Friday, March 13, 2026 (Court Day #913)

I got invited to play at 5 p.m. at Skypark. Initially, I didn’t think I was going to be able to pull it off, but then things lined up at work. It would be me, lefty Ben David, Mauricio, and Mike Cattivera.

I did get delayed a little bit and I texted the rest of our foursome to let them know that I would be about 10 minutes late. It was absolutely beautiful and sunny in Santa Cruz but as I drove into Scotts Valley, it was overcast. But I don’t mind the clouds when playing pickleball, it keeps the sun out of your eyes. Those clouds didn’t mean that it was cool however, it was still a warm 73°F.

Game 1
Mike and I won the first game 11-4.

Game 2
Ben and I were up 10-4. We slipped a little but still won 11-8.

Game 3
Mauricio and I were the first serving team, but never got the serve back and 0-11. That was a slaughter.

Game 4
After that, we wanted redemption, but we lost again, 2-11.

In my those two games paired with Mauricio, the losses were not entirely his fault. I was also not playing as well in those games.

Game 5
Mike and I won 11-3.

Games Won:
Mike 4, Andrew 3, Ben 3, Mauricio 0. Mike had 4 games against Mauricio, Ben and I each had 3. This was not Mauricio’s best outing.

More Games

Here things got switched up. Ben and Mauricio took off. Talkative lefty Michael was off on another court with Ashley drilling. We invited them over to play.

Mike and I lost 9-11 to Michael and Ashley. 

Then lost again 6-11.

We were up 8-4 in the third game but also lost that one 8-11. There was no question that we were being outplayed by Ashley and Michael tonight.

We wrapped things up at 7:40 p.m.

And?

Lefty Michael was absolutely on fire tonight. He played absolutely the best I’ve ever seen him play.

Ashley is very nonchalant playing. He looks like he’s playing so casually, but he is extremely effective in his shots. Plus it doesn’t hurt that he’s over 6 foot and he is able to reach a lot of balls easily.

I have to tip my hat to Ashley, he’s a better player than I am.

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Saturday, March 14, 2026 (No Play)

This is a pretty amazing rally. The thing about high-level sports, is how the pros make it look so easy. It’s kind of interesting to watch this rally and think about how often you would normally see mistakes at the lower levels. Crosscourt dinks into the net, slams where the ball does not come back, drives they sail too long, unsuccessful serves, and more. Not in this one.

Fundraiser

Mauricio and his wife Shaye were key in hosting a fundraiser tonight to benefit a local robotics club for county high school students. My wife wanted to stay home, but I opted to attend. There were a smattering of pickleball people there, including Frabrizio and Jessie as well as little Linda (Linda Samaha). Also there was my former student Mary Youngdale and her husband Erik. (I’m looking forward to playing with Erik’s mom sometime, she’s supposed to be a really good player in SoCal.) Jessie, aside from being an attorney, is also a belly dancer and she did one whole dance with a sword on her head! Impressive!

Number of days on a court: 913
Number of total hours: 3,417
Number of paid coaching hours: 203.5

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

Thursday, March 12, 2026 (Court Day #912)

Gabe Yardio pulled off a lightning-fast “Kyle” crosscourt speedup. Really nice!
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVzbN1DkehL

Game Videos Review

I’ve been reviewing my game videos that I have been taking over the past few weeks—including looking at the final scores—I’ve come to the conclusion there is something fundamentally awry with my game. I need to be more patient and wait for obvious opportunities to attack instead of forcing them. Also, I need to give myself more margin for error.

There’s a consistent theme. Returns that are too long and fly out. Drives that are too hard with not enough margin for error and end up hitting the white tape of the net or sometimes even lower.

They are definitely strong points to my game, including serving, my drop shots, transition zone defense, hand speed at the net. But there are stupid things to fix.

“We’ll see if I can work on those tonight,” was what I was thinking as I drove to the courts.

Skypark

It was still sunny with no clouds to be seen and it was still a very warm 77° when I arrived at the courts at 6:31 p.m. I lucked out when I arrived, I was able to grab the one open parking space left in the lot.

After over 9 years of playing, I had a first. Winning two games in a row 11-0.

In the first, Ben and I won 11-0 against Ken and young Gabe. 

In the second, Ben and I won 11-0 against Ken and Scotty. 

Ben and I won 13-11 against Alex and Mauricio. This was a long, long back-and-forth game.

The last game of the night was Alex and I versus Ben and Mauricio. It was also a very long game. Alex and I were down most of the game but had tied it up 8-8 when the lights clicked off.

There were more games, but those are the ones of note.

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Friday, March 13, 2026 (No Play)

A while back there was talk about a guy defrauding investors in a pickleball scheme. And maybe I talked about this before, but it popped up on social media again, a father and son—Randy and Chad Miller—were convicted about six months ago and have been spending some time in prison. They bilked $300 million dollars from people:
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02euhCBtSsAo1TVWXYPBxsLwnSbf9pT6UVDS9puQBjbxj5nH62XnVGTpP5gv7g8kLVl&id=100063889967200

There’s more about it here from September last year:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/sports-park-executives-sentenced-prison-municipal-bond-fraud

The reason it has been popping up is that a few days ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) today announced that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York entered a partial judgment against Jeffrey Puzzullo in an alleged municipal bond offering fraud:
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releases/lr-26498

Here’s the charges that were filed against the Millers and also Jeffrey De Laveaga:
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releases/lr-26280

All four men plead guilty to charges. That is a lot of money!

Number of days on a court: 912
Number of total hours: 3,414.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 203.5

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

Tuesday, March 10, 2026 (Court Day #911)

Tennis pro Nick Kygros is out playing pickleball in preparation of going onto the PPA tour…

DUPR mocking

With DUPR charging people to reset their DUPR rating, there are a good number of people giving DUPR a hard time about it. (As in, why charge people to fix a rating determined by your apparently insufficient algorithm?)

This Reddit discussion about it is pretty funny…

Why stop a DUPR Reset? Some other ideas…
byu/Particular-Night-435 inPickleball

Defense Matters

Here is a masterclass demonstration on defense. On the near court is Ben Johns with partner Gabe Tardio. Wow.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVpXVJ2jQsT

Play Time for Andrew

With the time change two days ago, it was very much still daylight on my trip to Scotts Valley when I left work shortly before 6:30 p.m. The one annoying thing was the sun was low in the sky. It gets in your eyes pretty much no matter what you try to do to prevent it. But still, it’s nice to have the sunlight.

Games

I teamed up with young Andy and we lost 6-11 to Jordan Rein and Marquis. This was a fun game. I’d say Jordan was the better of our two opponents, but both are stronger players than I am.

Jordan wanted a more balanced game and asked to play with me. He and I went on to win 11-4 over Andy and Marquis.

We played once again, and this one really was more balanced. Jordan and I still won 13-11.

DUPR

There were enough players tonight that we were using the paddle rack system. I went to put my paddle in and there were three paddles grouped with a Post-it note that said “DUPR?” Matt Babb was standing nearby and I asked him about it and he explained that Paul (his friend) was part of that group of paddles. I figured, “Why not?”

Once on the court, we had to figure out teams. I was on the side with Mike Diaz so I figured that would be as good as anything. Paul and I are the strongest players. It was only after the teams were decided that Mike told me that he had not played for a month. I had to chuckle a little bit of that, it figures!

Mike and I were up 8-1, but then lost 8-11 when we stalled out and Paul and Scotty stopped their errors and came back. Once the game was complete, I could see Paul was entering the result into the DUPR app on his phone. I was expecting my rating to go down a little bit after this game.

[Later note. I verified the final score and, as expected, my DUPR dropped a bit to 3.889. Lesson: no DUPR games at night and especially after a long day at work! But my reliability score for my rating is still only 20%… that is, up to 80% inaccurate.]

Lights Out

After the lights clicked off, there was the normal light-hearted pickleball community chatter as players fell into a little groups while getting ready to go.

There were three Indian guys, Ashley, Humad, and Shreyas, plus the short, very talkative friendly Michael. (Someone described Michael as a own local Richard Simmons of pickleball.) Ashley and Humad are hilarious! Part of the discussion was how Ashley gets mistakenly identified as Abhi. Both are tall, Indian, and can drive hard, though I’d take Ashley as a tournament partner. Michael turned to me and said “Abhi could benefit from some of your game, Andrew.” His point was that I play more of a control game versus driving very frequently. I was kind of surprised that Michael remembered that much about me.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026. (No Play)

Some people have been saying that Apple decided that adding a pickleball emoji in their latest operating system update was not worthwhile.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DVwm2pOEZtB
But that is not entirely accurate. Apple in and of itself does not call the shots. They are part of the Unicode Consortium based in Mountain View, about 45 minutes north of my house in the Silicon Valley. The Unicode Consortium’s Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) meets quarterly and decides what proposed emojis get added to the standard. The committee has representatives from Apple, Meta, Adobe, Microsoft and others. While we didn’t get a pickleball emoji this time, we might get one in another three months!

Number of days on a court: 911
Number of total hours: 3,412.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 203.5

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