Pickleball Mania!

Not long after moving to Arizona, I met a guy who invited me to take a pickleball lesson.  I hadn't seen the game in person, but I'd heard of it, and watched a bit on YouTube, so I knew I wasn't interested, but I agreed to go and watch.  Of course, as soon as I watched, I knew I'd have to try it!

If tennis and ping pong had a love child, it would look like pickleball - played on a court the size of a badmitton court, with a net similar to a tennis net, using a wiffle ball and what looks like an overgrown ping pong paddle.  The rules of play are similar to tennis, with a few notable exceptions - it's more of a finesse game than a power game, like tennis. 

Players are ranked based on their skills and tournament results (I'm a 3.5) - the very top players are 5.0.  Tournaments are usually divided by skill group, with 3.5 being by far the biggest group.

Although similar to tennis, pickleball has some advantages for a recreational sport:

• The court is smaller.  This fact, coupled with the slower wiffle ball, makes it easier for non-athletes to compete (although speed and athleticism is still a big advantage).
• The rules, in particular the "no volley zone" by the net, help to encourage long rallies - top players may hit the ball back and forth a dozen times or more on a typical point.  This makes the game a lot of fun to play.  The very top players focus on location rather than velocity for winning shots.
• Games tend to be closer - even players at slightly different skill levels can play and have fun.
• Since everybody's close together on the court, it's a more social game than tennis - there's a lot of laughing and joking before, during, and after points.

The above may make it sound like this is a sedentary sport best suited for the rocking chair crowd.  In fact, pickleball is about as competitive as you'd like to make it.  I play with a group that is very competitive (I often play with 4.0 and 4.5 players, and one woman just moved up to 5.0).  I'll often play for two or three hours with little or no break - an exhausting workout.  The benefits are obvious - a great aerobic workout that's fun.  At the end of our play, I'm always shocked at how quickly the time went.

When I first started to play, I was only interested in playing with friends for fun.  After playing for a year or so, I started to want to test myself against better players, so I decided to enter a tournament or two.  I teamed up with a woman who started playing about the same time I did for mixed doubles, and also entered a couple of tournaments with a male friend I had met last year.

Tournaments typically have awards for the top three finishers in each division, so of course I finished in 4th place in the first two I entered!  In the third tournament I entered, my men's doubles partner and I played poorly, and were eliminated in two matches (tournaments are typically a double elimination format).  Mixed doubles, happily, was an entirely different story - we advanced through the winner's bracket to the championship game, which we won!  It was a lot of fun - we met a number of new friends, and had a cheering section including our other friends who were competing in different divisions.

Here's a series from our championship match - a pretty typical exchange for us in this tournament:



 I'm hitting a "Drop Shot", intended to land in the no-volley zone.

Vicky and I are at the no-volley line, waiting for our opponent's return.

The return - a "Dink" was a soft shot hit to me.  I've just dinked the ball back into their "kitchen"(the no-volley zone)

They made a mistake, hitting the ball high to Vicky's forehand.  She's putting it away at their feet in this photo.  I'm starting to smile, because I know this point's in the bag!



We won this one!

The champions, with gold medals!

On that day, we played really well.  We're good players, but not elite.  Check out the video below to see pickleball played at the highest level.  Jennifer Lucore is, I think, the best woman player in the country.  She teams with Phil Bagley - a top men's player - and lose a close one to a team that includes Steve Wong, who has been ranked #1 in the country.  Vicky and I play a similar style to Lucore/Bagley, albeit at a lower level.

I'll never be an elite player, but I've had a lot of fun and made a lot of friends playing the great game with the funny name!

"They're Not Gonna Catch Him!"

The Spring Game was last Saturday.  The Huskers, as usual, have some talent - they won't win the national championship, but they'll have a decent team, I suspect.  Often, one or two relatively unknown player will step up and be the star of the intra-squad scrimmage, and it happened in a big way last weekend!

Jack Hoffman didn't play until late in the game.  On 4th down, he carried for the first - and probably last - time as a Husker.  The result was incredible.  Even if you're not interested in football, check out the video clip.  I suspect you'll be impressed with Jack, as well as the rest of the team.

Jack, by the way, is a 7 year old pediatric brain cancer patient.  He was befriended by former Husker running back Rex Burkhead, and has become close to a number of players on the team, and one of the players came up with the idea to put him in the game.  With this run, he goes into the record books as the leading rusher in the spring game, and his touchdown gave the Red team the win in the annual scrimmage that marks the end of spring practice.  I love the play by play guys calling the play ("He's got another gear!"), and it's quite touching to see all the players gathering around Jack.

One way to look at this is that this game doesn't count - it's just a practice, after all.  As I said before, often players will look like stars in this game, only to fall back into obscurity by fall.  In this case, I think this game does count.  This play may not mean much to football fans across the country, but it meant a lot to one little boy.  Twenty years from now, no one will remember who scored first in this spring game.  I bet we'll all remember who scored last.