I drove across the state on a beautiful Sunday for my midday pickleball play in Dayton, Ohio. One of the things that seems strange about driving all over the place for pickleball is I’m often on the road longer than I play. I used to justify trips based on doing “something” longer than it took to drive there but with pickleball, that doesn’t seem to matter.
With pickleball it’s more about finding a good game. This group on Sunday is really strong and has so many people hit shots that I don’t expect. It’s easy to get into a routine and start to learn what your opponents do so I value getting the opportunity to play with different people. Spending an hour more driving than playing is worth it for me, especially since I don’t have play lined up on Sunday where I live.
The risk about driving as much as I do is the crazy stuff people will do in their car. I’m cruising along going probably 80 miles an hour and see a BMW all of a sudden put on his brakes. I’m like, what in the world is going on, who brakes on the interstate? I look at my GPS for indication of a speed trap, I whip my head around to look for cops and I don’t see anything. I naturally slowed down a little bit but I still passed him. As I was passing him I looked to see what he was doing. This guy had his cell phone in his left hand, pulled up from the steering wheel so that it was almost directly in front of his face. He had his glasses pushed down and he was reading the phone with his head tilted so he could see through the space without his glasses. I guess he needed to brake in order to fully comprehend what he was reading. A grown man doing a really dumb thing. Hopefully I can pay close enough attention to the nut jobs on the road as I plan on driving over there 8 more times.
I started out the day alright, using my Icon paddle. One of the things I’ve been trying to do is wear glasses when I play. I actually wear glasses off the court but because they are bifocals I don’t wear them when I pickle. I will see people that I play against out in public and they’ll look right at me and not say hello. I used to dwell on it but I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t that they didn’t like me or that they weren’t nice, they just flat out don’t recognize me without a hat and wearing glasses. Anyway, the last time I went to the eye doctor I ordered glasses to play in and I’ve been trying to ease into wearing them on the court.
I probably started wearing a hat about 45 years ago. To suddenly start wearing one with glasses is quite a challenge. I tried to do it a couple of times but it didn’t go well. Today I went with a ponytail and glasses. I have so much hair right now I need like 3 ponytail holders to keep it all back so I only made it a few games before I went back to the hat and no glasses. As soon as stuff started to go wrong I’d start thinking, Oh, I’m not wearing my hat or oh, I’m wearing my glasses – all things that aren’t relevant to my game like bending my knees or keeping my paddle out in front. It’s wild how little things become routine and can mess with your head, if you let it, when you don’t do the routine.
I played okay one or two games and then I played terrible. It was almost like as we progressed I got worse, which is usually not the case. Typically the more warmed up I get the better I play. By the third game I was hitting everything in the net. My partner and I got blanked which is a little bit unusual. We swung back around and played again and did a bit better.
One of the wonderful things about this group is that we play an hour of women’s and an hour of mixed. We play with everyone. At first when I started playing with them I thought, wow, this is really controlling. But after days and days at home playing with the same people, getting stuck in rotations, spending 2 hours and not stepping on the court with certain people, it’s a huge relief to have that organization in place.
When we switched to mixed play I grabbed my Selkirk paddle, thinking maybe some of my struggles could be because we we’re using a Dura ball. During the week I play with a Franklin so to show up and start using a Dura, it’s like a normal swing and the thing takes off like a rocket. I really don’t think I was missing shots because of the ball but I wanted to see what a rocket ball and a missile paddle would do.
I actually did pretty well with the Selkirk. Knowing the paddle hits with power and the ball whistles as it goes by, maybe I didn’t swing as hard as I usually do. I seemed to have more touch with the Selkirk, Dura combo.
We had a bunch of good mixed games and I had a lot of fun. When we wrapped up play I realized the reason I played poorly was one thing. It wasn’t the hair. It wasn’t the paddle, not the ball, not the glasses and not the hat. It could have been I wasn’t bending my knees enough and I was dragging my paddle but realistically the real reason I had a few bad games was because I forgot to chew gum, another routine I didn’t realize was so important.
