Pickleball Journey

Sunday, March 30, 2025 (Court Day #786)

It was pretty gloomy and it rained, so the morning club play at Derby Park was canceled. About 2:15 p.m., the sun is broke through and clouds were starting to dissipate. My wife left about that time for some activities she was joining in with some friends of hers. I reached out to Connor to see if he wanted to drill, but I didn’t hear anything back. About half an hour later, I decided to head to Brommer Park, with the hope of picking up some games.

Brommer

I arrived at Brommer Park at 2:59 p.m. and, promisingly, there were about 15 cars there.

When I got in, I spotted David L. and his girlfriend Minori on a court by themselves. I called over asked if I could join them and they invited me over. I warmed up with them until a fourth arrived, Brian Hackett. (Brian replaced me as the Sunday site coordinator at Derby Park last year.) I have no recollection of those games… other than they were fun and I was playing well.

After two or three games like that, I then rolled into games that were pretty much all 4.0 level players. Those games were great—very challenging and they were games where everyone wanted to play either a rematch or mix it up with the same players.

It was very windy for the first hour and a half. In those first games, the wind had a dramatic effect on the ball. Then, as the sun got lower in the sky, especially when the sun got into the clouds on the horizon, wind died down completely.

I got into a game against Dale and his son Chris. I hadn’t met them before. Or if I had, it’s been some time and I’d forgotten. Someone told me that Chris is a really strong player. And, indeed, Chris has one of the top three best serves I’ve ever had to return. Very fast. Within a few points, though, I overheard Dale turning to his son Chris and observed to him that I have really quick hands.

Marco and I played a game against tall Dave and Chris.

In my last game, I played with tall Dave against Chris and a regular, young guy whose name I forget. Dave and I lost. I think it was 6-11. Early in the game, I turned to lefty Dave and told him that I had just made three mistakes in a row. After being there for three hours and then sitting for 15 minutes, I was starting to get stiff, and my back was starting to tighten up. I could definitely feel it.

Very shortly thereafter, I called it a day and headed home. It was shortly after 6 p.m.

Today was the best stretch of games over three hours period that I’ve had in a long time and I was playing pretty well.

And?

And my mistakes today? Over the three hours or so, I missed about half a dozen serves. I think two were too long, and the rest were into the white tape of the net. Other errors, I think I missed about a dozen reset drop shots into the net. I hit a couple of shallow crosscourt shots wide… some were volleys, some were off the bounce.

I got far more outright wins on my serves than my opponents today. I gave up only one or two returns into the net. At one point, I had three of my serves returned into the net by my opponents in a row.

I have to break myself of a the return of a bad habit. On crosscourt dinks or crosscourt shallow drop shots from my opponents, lately, I will occasionally try to speed those up even though they are too low. Three times today, I missed judged those, and sent them up into the net. I need to make wiser decisions on those and be more patient.

Pickleball on National TV

Sunday’s PPA finale was slated broadcast on FOX this afternoon, but I read that coverage got bumped back an hour for some ho-hum soccer game. I had completely forgotten about it until it was well over. I’d rather play than watch!

Knee

Later in the evening, the outside of my right knee was sore from playing so it got the ice treatment. It’s hard to say if it was entirely from just playing or a combination of riding the Peloton bike in the morning, playing for three hours, and then riding the Peloton again for another 20 minutes in the evening. That’s a lot of knee work.

Number of days on a court: 786
Number of total hours: 3,116
Number of paid coaching hours: 126.5

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

Thursday, March 27, 2025 (Court Day #785)

A message sent to the board of the Santa Cruz Pickleball Club shared that Val Rathbone and her husband Stan replaced the fabric mesh of the nets that need it at Derby Park. Great. Upgrades are good even if I only rarely play at Derby these days. Also, Stan and a man named Larry installed a desperately-needed new cable along the fence for the players to hang up their backpacks. The old cable had been removed by the City of Santa Cruz when they replaced the windbreak fabric along the fence there.

Rain

Rain was predicted, but I was hoping against hope that I might be able to play tonight so I hedged my bets and loaded my pickleball gear into my car at lunchtime. It was looking pretty decent until 4 o’clock rolled around and it started absolutely pouring rain. Fortunately, I didn’t last long and the clouds broke up and there was even a little bit of sun for a brief moment. I figured the odds were decent that the Skypark courts could be dry enough to play on.

Shoes

This morning I was taking a good look at the bottom of the shoes I typically wear for pickleball. They’re getting very sad and there is one spot where I felt I could probably even push through the sole with my finger, but I didn’t want to break out a new pair of shoes right then. I like to wear new shoes around for just short stretches over a week to start breaking them in versus running out and playing in them for a full session. That’s asking for blisters!

Trip

One week from today, I’ll be in Seattle for a tradeshow. My plan is to fly in one day early so I can spend part of a day on Bainbridge Island, the birthplace of pickleball. There are some courts on the north side of the island called Founders Courts. I’m hoping to play there. More south, the very first pickleball court is secluded on private property that includes the home belonging to an elderly couple. Understandably, they don’t advertise the location or promote public tours in their private and somewhat rural neighborhood.

Scotts Valley

I arrived at Skypark at about 6:50 p.m. It was pretty easy parking in the lot which meant there were not going to be as many players there.

And no kidding. I walked in, and there were no portable nets set up. Games were going on three of the courts, and David L. and Mo’s husband Frank were hanging out waiting. I asked David and Frank if they wanted to warm up and while David agreed, Frank said he was going to wait for Mo. We moved over to the open permanent court and warmed up until we could get into a game. I was teamed up with a woman named Megan—whom I’ve seen before on rare occasions—against David and a shorter lefty named Eric whom I’d had never seen before. It was a close game and, honestly, I can’t remember who won.

I was told that before I got there one of the players had slipped in a wet spot on the court and fell. I was playing a game with the new guy Eric—maybe a 3.5—against Josh and David. We were losing that game by a wide margin and, unfortunately, while going for an ATP, my partner pulled his calf muscle and had to discontinue the game. But that had nothing to do with any problem with the court surface.

I ended up playing three games with tall tennis Josh as my partner against lefty Aaron B. and David. We played four games.

Josh and I won the first game then we switched sides and David and Aaron completely cleaned our clocks. We lost 0-11. It was crazy. Josh and I were both making far too many errors.

Then we switched sides and Josh and I were ahead 8-2 but then Aaron and David made a run and tied up 8-8. Shortly thereafter, Josh and I closed out the game and won.

We switched sides and played one more game. This time Josh and I made a better showing, winning 11–5. We wrapped up that last game a few minutes before the lights went out.

And?

I felt my play was on again and off again. Over the course of the evening, I hit at least half a dozen returns too deep, giving my opponents a point. They were also a few drop shots that were far too short. Granted, they were volley drop shots which are more difficult, but still, those are frustrating. In the end, as I drove home, I was satisfied with my play. I definitely played better in that last game.

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Saturday, March 29, 2025 (No Play)

The Kitchen Pickleball, which has a newsletter, posted to their social media the following diagram:

To some, the chart looked familiar, including the author of the original version of this chart, Ann Mayer!

Does this look similar?

As you can see, The Kitchen simply copied Ann’s work—ignoring the copyright right on it—and shared it as their own creation. Not cool.

Now, I’m a total data nerd and was wondering about how Ann got these percentages. I reached out to her and had a conversation, which included her explanation:

“I took the majority of the info from the USAPA & UTRP Rating Systems. The percentages came from a discussion with a pro and are a general guideline. The purpose of the diagram was to give players a realistic visual to gauge their progress. Many players think they are much more advanced then they actually are. And depending on your preferred style of play, you could be at two different levels. For ex: you might be a 4.0 Classic player, but a 3.5 Modern Competitive.”

Of course, it begs the question. Most players are playing just rec play. They don’t really care about ratings and don’t plan to do tournaments. Most of these players are 2.5, 3.0, and some 3.5 players. The higher the rating, the more likely a player is going to be doing tournaments of some form. The vast majority of people belonging to USA Pickleball are tournament players. That means that the membership of USAP will be skewed to higher rated players and is not representative of the entirety of players. So USAP/UTRP/UTR-P will give you pretty accurate percentages at the top but become less and less accurate the lower the ratings. In other words, I’d believe that 3.76 and above is fairly solid in terms of the ratios of the percentages, but the actual percentages might be suspect. In my experience, 4.0 and above is top 10%, not top 15% (10%+4%+1%).

Anyway, something to “nerd out” speculating about.

Number of days on a court: 785
Number of total hours: 3,113
Number of paid coaching hours: 126.5

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

Tuesday, March 25, 2025 (Court Day #784)

I arrived at Skypark after work at about 6:50 p.m. It was busy enough to use a signup board but it didn’t take long to get into games. Well, it would’ve taken longer had I waited for better players. This evening was not-so-great games with at least one or two weaker players in each one.

It wasn’t until the last game of the evening that I had four reasonably strong players on one court. I was playing with Adam (a lefty) against lefty Aaron B. and Mike Sullivan. It was a close game, but we lost.

I felt that I played ok tonight, but nothing to write home about. I made my share of mistakes.

Tennis Players are Nicer

Zach—the young guy who was teaching off-the-radar pickleball classes at Skypark on Sunday afternoons—came tonight. He came up to me and gave me a sideways bro hug. When I said I hadn’t seen him for a while, he said he moved to San Jose and had a full-time day job now and has gone back to teaching exclusively tennis. He asked how my classes were going. I told Zach the story about a two weeks ago when I gently warned a group that they’d need to move to the other open permanent court at 1:30 due to my parks & rec class. Seven minutes later, when I told them it was time to move to the open unreserved court, the man got in my face and gave me a hard time for forcing them to move mid-game. After my story, Zach said that tennis players understand the tennis is harder to learn and are therefore more humble and nicer. I’m not sure I 100% agree, but pickleball is indeed easy to learn… but it’s also very difficult to master. And I’ve found pickleball players are generally very friendly, but there are always rare exceptions.

Rain Coming

It’s supposed to rain half an hour for the rest of the week through Sunday at least. I’m on my break from classes so at least I don’t have to worry about rescheduling those due to rainouts.

Rallie Machine

I received an email in the past few days from the Rallie Pickleball machine people saying that there are only a handful of their machines left unspoken for. It’s kind of silly that they’re sending me this message given that I already bought one. Regardless, the message did explain the ball machines will be shipping in the middle of next month. That will be exciting. I’m thinking I’m going to see about getting my hands on one of the new quieter paddles… like one of the Owl brand paddles. My plan is to use the ball machine in my backyard, so I’d like to make it as quiet as possible when appropriate (like evenings) for my neighbors.

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Wednesday, March 26, 2025 (No Play)

A video popped up. The key takeaway was to determine which opponent is better at offense and which is better at defense and adjust your shot selection based on that. Surprisingly, I’d never considered this. It’s good advice and seems obvious when you think about it. Sure, if your goal is to win, you hit to the weaker player. But the weaker player may depend on where your opponents are on the court! (And I when say “goal is to win”, I typically don’t go out of my way to hit to the weaker player during rec play… in fact, it’s often the opposite. Tournaments are an entirely different scenario though!)

In other words, if you have two opponents back and on the defensive and you know which is weaker from that position, that one should get the ball. And if you have two opponents at the net and ready to attack, you want to try and isolate the one who doesn’t attack as well.

Something to consider!

Number of days on a court: 784
Number of total hours: 3,111.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 126.5

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