The ladies drill group was extra easy to do tonight. Preparing for it was far from easy. We decided last week we would do a round robin night, playing games the entire evening. So we essentially did a drill group without drills.
In order to have some order, we discussed options as how best to do it. I suggested we play for 11 minutes, grab and drink and our next game in 2 minutes. The same routine we followed at Wolverine pickleball when I visited there a few weeks back.
Because I made the suggestion, I had to figure out the teams and timing. That took me over 3 hours to do and I had to solicit help from a math expert in order to get it done. He seemed to enjoy the first time he solved what he called a puzzle but we then learned we would have 10 players instead of 12, requiring an entirely new puzzle be solved.
On top of that, I got confused on our start time and added 30 minutes to the schedule randomly. And to make it even more tricky, 2 people wanted to play together more than once and 1 person need to leave 30 minutes early.
It was definitely the most confusing and challenging “thing” I’ve put together for pickleball and I really can’t take credit for it because I needed so much help. However, the schedule finally got done, we started on time, people got to play together, 1 person got to leave early and no one had trouble understanding the concept.
Since we were playing for time and not necessarily to “win” the players were encouraged to practice shots they had worked on over the last few weeks. I got to play all but 3 games and that was very much appreciated. I got some hits in and was able to watch how people were doing. I was very proud of a few of the games because people were doing drop shots, people were trying to dink and people were getting winners off serves. This is a competitive group so people were trying to do well but they also were impressive with their effort to implement what we had drilled.
I think everyone had fun and enjoyed the change of pace. I was very happy that the schedule and the teams worked out. We had a megaphone that had a siren and that indicator to stop play and move to the next segment worked out perfectly.
Afterwards a few of us went to grab something to eat and we bumped into some of the players and other pickleballers we know. It was a fun evening on and off the court.
