Category: Pickleball (Page 112 of 324)

Sunday, January 14, 2024 (Court Day #622)

It was quite rainy last night and this morning and I woke up to cloudy skies and very wet ground. With no sun, there is very little question about whether to cancel club play the Derby Park this morning. I sent out the club cancellation notice.

My brother John texted me asking if I was playing today. I told him that it might work out later in the day.

The big question was whether or not Willowbrook would be dry enough to hold my afternoon class. Fortunately, my wife and I have friends near there so I had Laurie check the courts at 12:30 p.m. for me. There were some puddles but her photo showed sun and that should dry out the courts.

I emailed all my students and asked them to bring towels just in case. As it turned out, the one towel that I brought was adequate to get the remaining small puddles dried out from when I arrived at 1:05 to 1:30 when my class started. We ended up using the two drier courts nearest the road instead of the two we normally use.

One of my students, Nina, didn’t come again this week. That was unfortunate as it left me with seven students which meant I had to be in a foursome, which is always harder to teach. (When I checked email in the evening, she said she had to drop out of my class completely. Bummer.)

Once I was done teaching, Maia called over and asked me to play on their court with Lester and his wife. (I rarely see Lester and I’m not sure if I’d seen his wife before, I think they may be south county residents.) They are all 3.0 players, so rallies were short and I was taking it a bit easy so the points wouldn’t end too quickly. For instance, every time I returned a serve with slice, the rally would immediately end. So I only did a few of those. We played a couple of games, then I headed to Derby Park.

Derby Park

I drove to Derby to meet my brother John, his friend Deborah, and my son Nicholas who they picked up at my house. (He’s visiting this weekend.) Derby was the busiest I’ve ever seen it at any off time! All the courts were full, the bench was full and a couple of college-aged youths were sitting up against the fence waiting to play.

I spotted a few familiar faces, Pauly, Avery, Mauricio. It would be hard to get any play and the sun was not going to last all that much longer, so we decided to head to Willowbrook in John’s car.

Willowbrook Park

When we got to Willowbrook, there were a couple of familiar faces. Rick Abend and Lourdes were drilling on a net that they’d brought and set up. When I asked, Rick said he was now living nearby and his daughter is living in his house back near Derby Park.

Our group of four rotated partners and played an hour until it got too dark to see. I played most of the time left handed. It’s good practice for me, I don’t want to lose that skill. John dropped Nicholas and me back at my car and that was a wrap!

Tournaments

I registered for the newly announced tournament at Cabrillo on February 24. It’ll be my first 4.0 tournament. I’m playing with Jason Brown for men’s doubles and René Baker for mixed doubles.

Binh texted me a couple days ago about a couple tournaments coming up. Monterey next month and Templeton in March. I’ll have to mulch that.

Tennis Pro

29-year-old Genie Bouchard, formerly ranked #5 in women’s tennis, crossed over to try pickleball.

Maybe she believed all the tennis hype that pickleball is just an easier version of tennis and got a bit of a wake-up call:
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/genie-bouchard-destroyed-pickleball-debut

But, to her credit, she’s not discouraged and will continue to play both sports,

New Tour Ball

On January 4, it was announced that the PPA reached an agreement to have the Vulcan VPRO FLIGHT be the official pickleball of the PPA tour. This new, previously unannounced, ball replaces the Onix Dura Fast 40. The Dura has been obsolete for some time given the new generation of balls that have arrived. The venerable Dura plays well, but breaks far too easily and because of that, few players like it.

Here’s the announcement by Vulcan:
https://vulcansportinggoods.com/blogs/news/vulcan-new-official-ball-of-ppa-tour

This agreement cost Vulcan between $2,000,000 and $3,000,000, plus a percentage of each ball sold. As a result, Vulcan is selling the balls for $4—about 30% higher than, say, a Franklin X ball.

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Monday, January 16, 2024 (No Play)

A neighbor of Sgt. Derby Park wrote an email to the SCPC complaining about the parking impact of pickleball players. She said she contacted the City first. I wrote a nice letter back explaining that the club is working hard to find more and better places to play and also that only a minority of players at Derby are actually part of the SCPC.

Parking and other neighborhood impacts will continue to be an issue as pickleball continues to grow and grow.

Number of days on a court: 622
Number of total hours: 2,708
Number of paid coaching hours: 11

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Friday, January 12, 2024 (Court Day #621)

Today was the day of the Santa Cruz Pickleball Club board meeting. It was my first one as a member of the board since I’ve now filled the secretary position. I went to print out the meeting agenda that I’ve been working on this week, but I couldn’t access the club’s Google account from home. (Kinks to work out!) I ended up making an unexpected drive to work to print the agenda from there.

I pulled into Brommer Park at 9:22 a.m. and the car in front of me strangely circled around and simply passed by the last spot in the parking lot. I was a happy guy!

DUPR

It was decided to reserve half the courts, starting at 10 a.m., for DUPR games to help people get rated. Unfortunately, that meant anyone not participating in the DUPR games had to use only four of the eight courts from 10 a.m. to the end of club play at noon. Only about one third of the players were taking part in DUPR, so there were some very long waits for the other two-thirds. I debated about doing the DUPR games, but the better competition was in the open play section, so that’s where I stayed.

I got in only four games—maybe it was even only three games. Regardless, it was an incredible amount of standing around. To further complicates things, at 11:30 a.m. a newbie showed up which took away one of those four non-DUPR courts leaving only three for people signing up for regular club play. There were a number of folks complaining about the DUPR impact.

Overall, I felt I played pretty well today. Sure, I had some bad shots, but those were greatly outnumbered by good shots. Today, I had some shots I was shocked that I got the ball back over the net . . . those were ones where I was contorting my body to get to some really uncomfortable ball, typically during some kind of firefight at the net.

Meeting

Once I finish the last morning session game, I headed over to the picnic tables for the club board meeting. The meeting was called to order at 12:22 p.m. There was Mark Dettle, Pam Rissmann, Jackie Signor, Dan Bliss, Andrew McLeod, and myself. There’s no treasurer for the club right now, which is a significant problem that we need to take care of soon. John Pacholski provided his last Treasurer’s report by email, which we read at the meeting. Two board members weren’t there—Barbara Gerry, who is sick, and Kristin Long who had warned she might have a timing conflict—which turned out to be the case. We went through the agenda talking about site coordinators, court repairs, club events, and various topics of discussion for the club. We adjourned the meeting at 1:36 p.m.

More Games

Before I headed over to the board meeting, René had asked if I was going to stick around and play some. Initially, I told her “no”, but now she was in this game with the exceptionally good player named Eddie. I met Eddie very briefly last week. I got to really talk to him this morning. Eddie is from Venezuela and he’s married to a woman named Christina who arrived a bit later than he did and also left earlier. Eddie said he’s been playing about a year and a half but comes from a college D1 tennis background. Christina said she’s a relative newbie but is learning to play.

Unfortunately, Eddie took off after that game was finished so I didn’t get to play with him.

I played four games with Jackie, René, and Pauly. We rotated through partners. Those are really fun games. Pauly has gotten much, much better, though he was still the weakest player on the court. What was unusual is I was experiencing some mild cramping in my right calf and right hamstring in those last games. But it wasn’t constant and it didn’t affect my game.

Those were fun. I hit an ATP but René got it back over the net and my partner was there to cover and keep the point going. Good stuff.

At 3:15 p.m., I called it a day and headed out. I originally had told my staff I would be in about 2 p.m. but at this rate it’ll be closer to 4 p.m.! I worked a ton in the last month, I think I’m entitled to a little bit of time off.

Hopefully tonight, I’ll get time to type up the minutes from the board meeting. Yet one more duty for me to do in my life!

Happy Losing Shot

I can’t remember the players, but it was in a strong game—I was proud of myself for not getting to a ball and allowing my opponents a winner. What? Crazy, right? I was on the right. The ball was a sharp diagonal dink that landed about 2” inside the line to my right out of my reach. Great shot. But risky shot. The reason I didn’t get it was I was covering the middle and the high percentage shot instead. You’ll sometimes lose doing that, but you’ll win more. Riley Newman would be proud of me.

Oh, what to say for court hours today? I had about 4 1/2 hours waiting for and playing games, but with all the extra waiting, I’m going to call it 3 hours to add to my total.

Number of days on a court: 621
Number of total hours: 2,706
Number of paid coaching hours: 9.5

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Thursday, January 11, 2024 (Court Day #620)

I left work early to cook dinner for my wife, but she had forgotten that I was planning that tonight and she wasn’t too keen on me cooking what she had prepped for. She said that I could go to pickleball, so that’s where I headed. When I pulled up to the courts at 5:30 p.m., it was a chilly 46°F.

There was plenty of parking and weirdly only two games going, but I don’t remember ever being at Skypark that early before. I asked someone if this lack of players was normal at this time and he didn’t know either.

I got into a game fairly quickly and people started to trickle in. At the peak of the evening, all eight courts were going, though earlier on, one court at the end was not being used because it had some slippery wet spots on it.

You could easily see your breath and people were complaining about the cold. My hands were numb. I was wearing shorts but I wore my sweatshirt the whole session…typically, I remove it after a few games—not tonight!

The first hour and a half worth of games were confidence boosters. I was winning every single game regardless of who I happened to be partnered with and I was rotating through various people against various opponents. I played some games with Paul, Minori and her boyfriend David, and later Matt Babb arrived as well. Paul and Matt played against David and me. They won a game. We won a game and then in the last game I was not playing well at all and we lost without scoring a point. By then I was quite tired and hungry. It was 8:17 p.m. I was having a hard time concentrating, so I figured since I’d be playing tomorrow morning at Brommer anyway, I would call it a day and head home.

I had my moments—like doing a beautiful dropshot from the baseline to reset the point after a deep lob over my head—but, overall, I was not happy with my play. I’m continuing to wear my right knee brace and my right wrist brace and those help minimize discomfort.

My car read 43°F when I left, it had dropped only about 1 degree per hour. Interesting.

Number of days on a court: 620
Number of total hours: 2,703
Number of paid coaching hours: 9.5

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