It was a long wait for some pickleball since my normal Sunday routine was disrupted by unsafe travel weather. Beautiful snow covered our city, the perfect snowball making kind. I patted a few together and tossed them at my dog but she didn’t find it humorous. I cleaned my kitchen floor, made some cauliflower tabbouleh and baked a turkey that had been in my freezer for quite some time. It wasn’t as exciting as pickleball but I at least stayed busy.
Since I didn’t leave the house yesterday I was running low on groceries (that frozen turkey paid off) and didn’t have my normal coffee or seltzer water. I drank Folgers (eek!) and plain water all morning, all the while thinking, I’m awake and I shouldn’t hurt later today – at least using my water fixes everything theory. I may not hurt tomorrow but today I remembered why I don’t drink a lot of water. Trying to “hold it” while playing definitely falls in the category of why I don’t. I managed to forget how badly I needed to go a few games in so it wasn’t too awful.
We only had 5 people today and 1 needed to leave a little early. I had a hard stop at the normal ending time (not the extra 15 minutes) and when I left I felt like I let the boys down.
It was a bit of a roller coaster of play. A few games felt intense, win-at-all-costs, other games felt like fun, work on your shots. There were quite a few dink rallies, a lot of great angle shots, a bunch of lobs and some hard hit balls that were tricky to defend. I managed to land an ATP and successfully defend 1.
One of the guys was playing what looked like a new formation. He was either in the transition zone or playing in the middle just off the kitchen. The transition zone approach is still tough for me to properly navigate; he’s back there so he has extra time to react and I continued hitting the ball the way he needs it in that location. When he played the middle I would try to go with a deep, hard angle but it was risky. He’s easily the best around with tweeners and every time I hit it there I would think, holy crap, he’s going to get that. Luckily, he didn’t land any of the shots so I guess my shot selection was ok.
One of our guys chased down a lob and got tangled up in the tennis net, taking a tumble. I didn’t see it happen but I saw our opponent’s faces and immediately looked back, watching him land perfectly on his back and avoiding a big, major fall. I think he would have got the next ball, which I imagine was all he was thinking about because he didn’t want anyone to worry and he played on like nothing happened. When I saw how he landed and rolled I thought, hmm, I wonder if he was avoiding hitting his knee (he had knee replacement) because it sure looked like how I rolled when I was trying to avoid hitting my knee on a fall last summer.
I’m a little jealous of all the people leaving town for warmer weather but I’m grateful we had enough to put together a few games today.
