Author: andrewlenz (Page 144 of 328)

Tuesday, August 30, 2022 (Court Day #539)

After work, I practiced bagpipes for 15 minutes, then drove and imposed on my mother to give me a haircut—which she is done my entire life and is quite good at it! (The price is right and we get to visit too.) Fortunately, my parents’ house is on the way to Scotts Valley, so it was a short hop from there to Skypark and I arrived at 7:30 p.m. The parking lot was completely full and even overflow parking was completely wonky … but there was a street spot nearby.

First Game

I jumped into my first game tonight without any warm-up. I was partnered with Charles against Texas Mike and retired firefighter Matt Smith. This was a great game to get into with all pretty good players. Charles and I won handily. At one point we were leading 8-0. They did end up scoring a few points, but the game was never in doubt.

In that first game Charles asked if I got a haircut. I told him he was the only one to notice. Charles said he was sorry that no one else noticed, but I explained that I had my haircut about 15 minutes before he appeared at Skypark.

Mike and Matt wanted to rematch of course, so we did that. This time I didn’t play nearly as well. I hit some of my service returns too deep. I hit my drop shots too high. It was overall not nearly as good. We ended up losing by only a few points, but that was mostly Charles’ stronger play and not me, otherwise it would have been worse.

Ouch

In the second game of Texas Mike and Matt Smith against Charles and myself, Matt hit one of his crazy hard drives and the ball smacked me in the right index finger of my paddle hand. It was hard enough that it broke the skin and caused some bleeding. I didn’t feel like it warranted a Band-Aid, but a few points later blood ended up on my left hand also. Charles asked if I needed to stop for a Band-Aid, but I told him no. After the game is over, however, I did put a Band-Aid on my finger. The downside with the fabric Band-Aid, is that my index finger was now slippery on the handle of my paddle. It was annoying but I still had three fingers and my thumb so things went OK. I don’t think I want to ever play in a tournament tournament like that however!

Easier

Nearly any game would be a step down after those. I played a game with the Hispanic fellow named Mark against TK and his friend Ryan. TK said, ”It been a while since we’ve played together, you need to tell me if I’ve improved.” He was the very first server and promptly served that ball into the net. I kidded TK, ”Nope!” I was the strongest player on the court but it was not enough to make up for Mark. We lost.

More Losses

I played with Darrell against Matt B. and his friend Paul W. Darrell and I were not playing our best, he was tired and I was also tired. We got blown out the first game 11-1 or 11-3 … regardless it was a very lopsided game. Matt and Paul played well. We went on to have a rematch, however that loss was quite a bit closer, 11-9 or 11-8. We played a third game in this one was back to lopsided—I think we lost 11-6 or 11-5. We lost all three games.

For the last game of the night, Paul stepped out at allowed Aaron to get in as Matt’s partner against Darrell and me. Even in this game while it was closer, Darrell and I still lost. I was playing a bit better than Darrell in this one, but still far from stellar. We finished our last game a few minutes before the lights clicked out at 9:30.

“Beer-30”

Matt B. had brought some beers so we share those were talking about pickleball for another 45 minutes.

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Wednesday, August 31, 2022 (No Play)

A few years ago, my brother John bought a cabin in Arnold, California, about three hours east of San Francisco in the Sierra foothills. I’ve never been there. My sister went up to stay this week and texted a photo to a few of us this morning. Yep, a pickleball court!

Arnold has a population 2,099. The City of Santa Cruz has a population of 65,000. If Santa Cruz had the same ratio of permanent courts to people, it would have 31 courts. Santa Cruz has 0.

Number of days on a court: 539
Number of total hours: 2,454.5

To start at the beginning of this blog click on “1st Post” in the menu above.

Thursday, August 11, 2022 (Court Day #531)

This morning, it appeared on social media that CBS would be broadcasting pro pickleball (the PPA summer championships) on their television network:
https://www.pennlive.com/sports/2022/08/cbs-will-broadcast-the-professional-pickleball-association-summer-championships-live-this-month.html

The article is a week old, but I just saw it. Too bad I’ll be working while it’s being broadcast live on Saturday afternoon.

Night Ball

I left work and arrived at Skypark at 6:30 p.m. and discovered a giant pile of mulch blocking the exit from the parking lot. All the regular parking spots were full so I ended up pulling in between a couple of trees.

When I arrived, there were no tennis players to be seen but all eight pickleball courts were full and 10 players were waiting to rotate on. There were more players than courts for a good couple of hours. I got in a variety of games, some were weaker games and some were stronger games.

Losing Mike

Some sad news, “Texas Mike” Ballard is moving to… well… Texas. He’s expecting to be there by the holidays. He’ll be very much missed, he’s one of the stronger players to be found at Skypark.

Games Tonight

The best games were Avery and myself against Charles and Dan—the strong player Dan, not the weaker Dan. Avery and I lost both of the games that we played against them. The first game was probably more on Avery than me, but in the second game I had my share of “less than stellar” shots. Charles and Dan were formidable. When I complimented Avery for his great ATP, he said, ”That’s all I’ve got.” Avery has the smoothest motion for dinks I’ve seen outside of pro players. He just needs a bit more experience. It’ll come.

The lights clicked off at 9:30, just a few minutes after I finished playing against John (the ceramicist, husband of Peggy) and Aaron with younger Dan, who is still a weak player, as my partner. As one would expect, we lost the game and the previous with the same player partnerings.

Before that game, Dan said he was the weakest player and asked to play with the strongest player, John looked at me and said, “Probably Andrew” then he moved to play with Aaron. A compliment.

After the last game, I gave Dan some advice about making sure to return the serve deep, as well as some advice about his positioning on the court so as not to leave a gap between him and his partner. In the case of those last two games, his partner with me.

Chattering

After the lights popped off, seven of us hung out for a while and talked quite a bit about pickleball tournaments, workshops, etc.

Matt said that he follows the San Jose Pickleball Club on social media, and they have addressed the skill discrepancy issue found when signing up for courts by using the DUPR app. By using that, each person gets a rating and there’s a determination where they should be playing or not playing. Personally, I think that’s brilliant and would be really great to help place players properly into appropriate skill groupings. There wouldn’t be much argument—it’s hard to argue with facts and data.

Toward the end of the evening, my back was getting kind of tight and fatigued. I was also pretty tired. I got up early for an 8 a.m. dentist appointment… meaning I didn’t get as much sleep as I normally get. That left me a extra beat.

At 10:45, I finally left the courts with John, Matt, and Paul.

Tournament

Mike, the tournament director for Chamisal, fixed my entry for next month, so I’m in the right event and now matched up with Jason.

As you can see, my UTPR rating (rounded down to 3.0) is followed by my “challenging up” event rating, 3.5. If someone sees this and thinks they’ll have an easier time of things since I’m a “3.0”, they are in for a shock. Jason signed up as a self-designated 3.5, so he gets no parentheses.

Drill Video

Tyson McGuffin had this good dink drill video:

Number of days on a court: 531
Number of total hours: 2,431

To start at the beginning of this blog click on “1st Post” in the menu above.

Saturday, August 7, 2022 (Court Day #530)

My son arrived in Santa Cruz last night from his extended cross country trip from North Carolina where he’s been in grad school at Duke for the last two years. At dinner, my wife Kristen said that her sister Liz and her husband Steve wanted to challenge Nicholas and me to a pickleball match. She said that Steve is “getting pretty good”. Nicholas seem to think that this match concept was a good idea. I told that Nicholas that should come play pickleball with me tomorrow morning (now today) and he agreed.

This morning, my wife was asking him on “a scale of 1 to 10” how much he wanted to play, and he told her a 6 or 7. Coming from Nicholas that’s probably a 8 for anyone else! I was pleased. Considering Nicholas was cooped up in a car for the most part the last couple of weeks, I suspect he was quite happy getting exercise. We left the house at about 8:35 a.m., with Nicholas wanting to take his own car in case you wanted to leave earlier. So he followed me on my trip down to Derby Park.

At Derby

Nicholas helped me with my site coordinator duties and set up some portable nets while I got things in order and blew off the courts.

I played some stronger games and some weaker games over the course of the morning, but due to the rotation timing, I was having a hard time breaking into games that were truly challenging . . . players I wanted to join had just started games and it was a very busy—and beautiful, if windy—day with at least 20 people waiting to get onto courts, so I might have to wait half an hour to get into a game with them. As it was, I made due with what I had.

Great Games!

The best games of the day by far were the last three where Eric S. and I took on Charles and firefighter Rob. I decided that I was going to play with Eric, and Eric agreed to be my partner, announcing immediately that our opponents would be very much a challenge—the inflection was one of not expecting to win. As one might expect, Eric and I did indeed lose the first game by about a 2 to 1 ratio. But we did a little bit better towards the end of the game.

We opted for a rematch, switching sides. This time Eric and I won by a pretty significant margin, also about 2:1, I believe it was 11-5. We turned the tables!

We went on to play a tiebreaker match with Eric and I leading that game 9-4. All we needed was two points to finish off that third game. Unfortunately for us, Rob and Charles went on a seven point run winning 11-9. But still have no regrets—that was a super fun game! Charles complimented me on my net play and said that balls came back that he had been expecting to be winners.

Nicholas

We finished up that last game at about 1:45 p.m. Nicholas had finished up his last game (with Anne and her husband Erick) while Eric S. and I were in the midst of our last game. For all the talk of leaving early, he stayed 5 hours! “I wanted to get better.” That’s my son, Nicholas, also a perfectionist like his dad.

Skill Creep

It was a free-for-all today with a number of lower-skilled players signing up in advanced. I was shocked at some of the names. I just have shake my head. At least they weren’t in my box.

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Monday, August 8, 2022 (No Play)

My sister-in-law tagged me on Facebook post sharing a local article about pickleball:
https://lookout.co/santacruz/guides/story/2022-08-05/pickleball-take-over-the-planet-we-investigate-this-fastest-growing-sport-laughter-trash-talk-ensue

It’s a long article with interesting insight. And, of course, there are photos of local players that I know, like Jon on the swing, Wendy with her arms raised in the air, Dan Bliss and Nolan partnered in a dink battle and another with them tapping paddles after a game.

Also seen today, a TSA post from five days ago, some people playing a mini-game in an airport using sandals as paddles and a fabric portable divider as a makeshift net!
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CgzpcGjvdZo/

I can’t tell you how many times that I’ve imagined a pickleball court in the walkway of an airport while waiting to depart! A lot!

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Wednesday, August 10, 2022 (No Play)

I’m so overloaded with deadlines and duties that I skipped pickleball last night. Something had to give.

Tournament

I recently talked to Jason Brown about playing in a tournament. He said he’d never done it before, but was interested. Binh and Eric, my former tournament partners were already booked (Binh) or not interested this time (Eric). I talked Jason through signing up for the “Monterey Bay Pickleball Championships” tournament at Charmisal last night. The men’s doubles events will be held on Saturday, September 10. Jason is now a dues-paying member of USA Pickleball.

Today, I was trying to register but PickleballTournaments.com was forcing me to register as a 3.0 player . . . or at least as far as I could tell. It was a bit confusing. My official UTPR rating is 3.432—unchanged since my last sanctioned men’s doubles event over three years ago. M playing in 3.0 would not be fair to true 3.0 players. I emailed Michael Zury who runs the event (the Tournament Director) to see if I should just sign up anyway and he could fix my rating category to 3.5. He wrote back quickly and said he could fix it once I registered. So I did. Kind of. I accidentally registered for Mixed Doubles. Oops. I wrote Michael again. Hopefully, he’ll get things all fixed and pair me with Jason as requested.

Oh, the registration plus event fee was a manageable $55. I find it crazy that some tournaments want $130 or more.

As of tomorrow, it will have been exactly three years since my last men’s doubles event. That was unsanctioned and was with Binh at the first—and so far only—local Cabrillo tournament.

Later

Someone posted a link to this online, aside from spelling ”Erne” wrong, its pretty funny…

Number of days on a court: 530
Number of total hours: 2,428

To start at the beginning of this blog click on “1st Post” in the menu above.