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

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 still very much light 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 you in the 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 is 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 won 11-4 over Andy and Marquis.

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

DUPR

There were enough players tonight that we were using the paddle rack system. I went to put a paddle in, and there were three paddles in there with a posted note that said “DUPR?” Matt Babb was standing nearby and I asked him about it and he said 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 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 Diaz and I were up 8-1, but lost 8-11 when Paul and Scotty came back. Once the game was done, I could see Paul was entering the result into the DUPR app on his phone. I was expecting my reading 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! The reliability score for my rating is still only 20 percent for accuracy.]

Lights Out

After the lights clicked off, there was the normal 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, friendly, and very talkative Michael—someone described Michael as our local pickleball version of Richard Simmons. (Ashley and Humad are so hilarious! Both have a great sense of humor!) Part of the discussion was how Ashley gets confused with Abhi. (Both are tall, Indian, and can drive balls 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)

People are complaining that Apple decided that adding a pickleball emoji in their latest operating system update was not worthwhile.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DVwm2pOEZtB
But, the rest of the story is that it’s not just Apple’s decision. The Unicode Consortium, a non-profit based here in California-based, determines which emojis are added to their official standard. Their “Technical Committee” is composed of representatives from major tech companies—including Apple, Google, and Microsoft, and it meets quarterly to consider new additions. So, maybe in another 3 months, pickleball may get added. Or maybe another 3 months after that. Or maybe…

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.

Monday, March 9, 2026 (Court Day #910)

Today was our monthly Santa Cruz Pickleball Club board meeting. I worked on some club business this morning at home and didn’t get the Brommer Park until about 10:30 a.m. Yesterday was absolutely beautiful, but today it was overcast and 54°. But truth be told, this is just about perfect for pickleball weather—cool and no sun in your eyes!

It was an organized club play day and the courts were full. When I arrived, it was an unusual circumstance, I was literally the only person waiting to play, standing by myself in the waiting area.

Games

My first game was with Marin against John Connors and Jeanell. Jeanell is one of those prototypical short, white-haired pickleball players the newbies get shocked by. She is certainly not a tall, young, athletic male, but she does a great job consistently getting the ball back over the net. We were midway through a close game when John announced that Janelle‘s ankle was hurting, and she wanted to stop, which we did.

The game of the morning was tall Paul versus Dave Ryan and Humad. We were leading 8-6 but lost 8-11. Fun game. Dave won a couple of rallies by driving a very hard shot straight ahead to my backhand along the sideline that I was guarding. In each case, I contacted the ball, but I was unsuccessful getting the ball back over the net. Dave’s partner also had one sideline winner like that as well.

Board Meeting

Our club meeting was pretty routine, nothing earth-shattering. Allen Greenberg was there—the plan is for him to take over George Propper’s Treasurer duties.

After Meeting Games

After our meeting ended around 1:30 p.m., Allen and I convinced a young guy Lucas and also Mark Dettle to join us for a game. Mark and I got completely clobbered in the first game—it was bad—but we redeemed ourselves and surprisingly won the second. We played a third game and the results in the third game were about the same as the first game although slightly better.

It was a disjointed outing for me, but that is typical for board meeting days.

By the time I left, it was sunny with only slight traces of clouds and the temperature is climbing closer to 70°.

Drilling

Mauricio texted and invited me to go drill at Skypark at 4:30 p.m. I told him that I could do 5 p.m. at Derby Park. He agreed and after only an hour of me at work, I left and headed to meet him. I had to spend a few extra minutes printing out the work schedule and talking to one of the staff about the schedule tomorrow so it made me five minutes late. On my way to Derby, I told Mauricio that it is going to be about five minutes late. He told me he had an errand to run for his daughter and so he wouldn’t be there until 5:20 p.m.

Conner McNicholas texted asking about drilling. I told him I’d already committed to drilling with Mauricio. He said he might stop by anyway.

I walked into the court at 5:05 p.m. It was somewhat busy with only two of the six courts open. It’s a far cry from the days when they’d be empty in the afternoons. And at least half the players were under 30 years old.

I worked on practicing my serving while I was waiting. The second court cleared out by the time Mauricio arrived. We got right into the straight ahead dinking followed by backhand crosscourt dinking, and forehand crosscourt dinking. We did that for about 20 minutes.

Games

A couple of guys that appeared to be in their mid-30s arrived, Cole and Taylor. Both are lefties and are over 6 foot.

Mauricio and I beat them pretty handily in the first game.

Conner and Abhi

Conner had been waiting, so I stepped out and let him take my place. It was a very close game but surprisingly Connor and Mauricio lost 10–12. Conner did mention that he was getting over an illness and hadn’t played for a couple of weeks.

Abhi was there and he asked if he could join me and we could take on the winners. We were waiting a while for that game to finish.

This was also a somewhat close game against Taylor and Cole. Abhi was making an uncharacteristic number of errors, such as drives into the net or drives too long of their baseline. I made five errors in entire game, including one pop-up. We did end up winning 11-8.

The last game was Conner and Mauricio against myself and Cole. With Cole being a lefty, I asked if he wanted to stack. He said he did and that not everyone know how, so he appreciated my offer. Cole complimented me a couple of times during that game as having fast hands. While the game was back-and-forth, Cole and I lost by a significant margin. Sometimes that happens, it’s just the way the ball bounces, as they say!

Progress

One of the hardest shots in pickleball is when a ball is dropped short over the net when you were at the baseline. Today, I had three successful handlings of that. Two were at Brommer against Dave Ryan and Humad. When I was on the right side with Humad in front of me, I was on a full sprint. I got to the ball and was it able to dink it to the middle successfully—low and controlled. The second one was when Humad was in front of me on the left side. I ran up, dinked the ball low over the net and he popped it up towards the middle, and I jumped to the right slamming it for a winner down the middle. The third one was at Derby Park. This one was with Taylor on the other side of the net across from me and again on a dead run, I was able to dink the ball low over the net successfully. It seems I’ve pretty much got this skill down.

While I still need to be more consistent and more patient, there are harder shots that are getting more reliable in my toolbox.

Number of days on a court: 910
Number of total hours: 3,410.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 203.5

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

Sunday, March 8, 2026 (Court Day #909)

Mauricio arranged a foursome for this morning, but this time Mike Sullivan was out of town so it would Frabrizio playing with Mauricio, Ben, and me.

The spring time change was today so it felt like an especially early morning! I was already running a few minutes late when I realized that I left my phone inside the house I had to go back and grab it. Oops.

Into the Sun

One big annoyance this morning with the time change is that I was driving into the sun when it was still low in the sky. It reminds me of years ago when someone was telling me that she would commute to Monterey for work every day. She told me that she would be driving into the sun in the morning and then also driving into the sun in the evening and how unpleasant that was. That commute is 45 minutes to an hour, but my “commute“ this morning was only about 10 minutes. I can very much sympathize with her annoying commute to Monterey!

Right Knee

My right knee is bothering me a little bit yesterday and more so this morning. Putting weight on my knee a certain way was causing a little bit of pain, and while I was driving I was feeling a mild bee sting sensation to the upper left side of my right kneecap.

Brommer Park

I pulled into Brommer at 8:05 a.m. Considering the time and the time change, it wasn’t a surprise that there were less than ten cars in the parking lot.

Game 1:
Even with the advantage of the sun in the eyes of our opponents, Mauricio and I lost this first game 6-11.  We did drag it out once they were ahead 10-5 and forced a number of service swaps before they finally closed out the game.

Game 2:
Frabrizio and I lost 3-11. I was still warming up and made a sad number of errors. This loss as on me, not Frabrizio.

Game 3:
Ben and I won 11-5.

Game 4: (Labeled “Game 1” of the videos.)
Mauricio and I lost 1-11. I have a synopsis below. This isn’t every single rally, but does include how they got their points with some additional notes… the dash (-) in front is a point in their favor.

– Mauricio hits ball into net. (0:10) 1-0
– Mauricio hits ball into net. (0:26) 2-0
– Frabrizio’s ball dribbles over net. (0:39) 3-0
– Andrew ball into net after ball to my feet. (0:56) 4-0
[side out at 0-4]
Andrew hits bad high drive, Mauricio pops up a volley, Frabrizio slams it. (1:31) 0-4
Andrew hits a really bad lob, bad from there. (1:55) 0-4
[side out 0-4]
– Andrew chicken wings 4th shot past the baseline. (2:12) 5-0
– Mauricio pops up shot. (2:35) 6-0
– Andrew backhand shot out past the baseline. (3:15) 7-0
– Mauricio returns serve into the net. (3:40) 8-0
– Andrew does a speed up that sails long past the baseline. (4:00) 9-0
– While at the net, Andrew hits a fast out ball which then sails long. (4:26) 10-0
[side out]
– Andrew hits Ben’s out ball speed up at my face. (5:15) 0-10
And on.
So with Ben and Frabrizio winning 10-0, there was a lot of back and forth for several minutes where we scored one point and they don’t score at all.
– Mauricio hits a failed chicken wing shot off a drive from Frabrizio into the net, ending the game.

I played so badly in this game. I was “grabbing at points” instead of being patient and taking solid opportunities. A lesson there.

Game 5: (Labeled “Game 2” of the videos.)
Frabrizio and I won 11-9.

Game 6: (Labeled “Game 3” of the videos.)
Ben I lost 10-12 after leading most of the game.

Game 7: (Labeled “Game 4” of the videos.)
Frabrizio and I won 11-5.

More Games

My courtmates left, so I found new partners to play with.

Mo and I lost a lot to Dan Dewey and a partner.

Hispanic Tony and I won against Mo and tall Dave 11-5. We had to stage a comeback to win.

Tony and I then lost 3-11 to Mo and Rick. As I closed in three hours of play, I was starting to get tired and a touch lazy.

Then Tony and I won 11-5 in the rematch.

The rubber match, we won again 11-8. There’s nothing like winning the last two of three games to make up for a 3-11 loss in the first game!

In those games against Mo, she had at least three or four shots that she drove and her ball landed literally on the sidelines. Those are hard to defend. She had those dialed in today.

Done

When I left at 11:35 a.m., surprisingly, 5 of the 8 courts were open.

It was an absolutely gorgeous sunny 72° day as I drove home.

Number of days on a court: 909
Number of total hours: 3,408.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 203.5

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