The Relish

A pickle(ball) breakdown, of sorts…

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  • #5 Depression and drop shots

    Struggling mightily this morning. Fell asleep sobbing last night. For twenty-one years I’ve battled on-again off-again bouts of depression, and currently I’m in an “on-again” phase. A night’s sleep brought no better feelings or clarity, and here I am again at 7:00a unable to feel joy. Tomorrow I’m driving down to Kentucky for my cousin’s bachelor party, and while I should be excited, I’m now feeling dread of being around a group of happy and successful guys. I’m fearful that I’ll go into a mental decline and drink myself to death. Mentally and emotionally I feel very much like a loose-cannon.

    But that isn’t what this blog is for. I just haven’t created an outlet to express those parts of me. This is a Pickleball blog; not therapy. I have a therapist. But I’m feeling an overwhelming sense of dread, regret, resentment, grief, sadness, nihilism and self-hatred.

    Anyways, here’s the Pickleblog.

    Getting my nephews involved

    I have two nephews: a fourteen-year old and an eleven-year old. They hear me talk about my enjoyment of the game and they want to learn. I want to buy a new paddle so I told them once that happens I’ll hand mine over to one of them, and when Kaitlin gets a new one she’ll hand hers to the other.

    There’s a woman whom both they and I are close with independently. She goes to their church and I see her at the Pickleball courts. She’s really good, and is a super pleasant and wonderful person to be around.

    Remember me bringing up the challenge courts people? She’s one of them. A solid player.

    We agreed to start teaching my nephews together. I took the teenager to the courts on Monday to get him used to hitting a bit and he did really well. He’s got a totally unfounded cockiness to him and a lack of patience for learning the rules, but I think that was just because I was the one “teaching” him. I’m not as respected as literally any other adult in his life. I’m seen more as “friend.” So this woman, “JS” we’ll call her, is going to be leading the charge and I actually think it’ll be fun.

    If we can get the boys to learn and inevitably LOVE the game, we’ll have a solid group of four for doubles. Aunt and Uncle, Thing One and Thing Two.

    Writing

    Five blogs in and I really enjoy this platform. This particular post was brief, but medicinal in a way. I do actually feel better having written just a little about the game and getting my nephews involved. I am struggling mightily though. And I can’t write all day. And it’s only 7:30a at this point. And I do not want to get back into my own head apart from this. But I don’t really have anything left to say regarding this, so time to go.

    Maybe I’ll tinker around with subtly improving the site. I do have other work to do as I hold on for dear life to my small business. We’ll see.

  • #4 A Monday MF

    I was a menace on the Pickleball courts yesterday morning. Following Saturday’s shitty showing, this was what I’m dubbing “motherfucker Monday.” I felt like I was in total control of what I was doing. I rediscovered the serve that was sending people backwards into the fence. I was drinking consistently over the net with good angles. I was holding my own against some of the stronger players at the park. It was awesome.

    CB

    There’s a guy at the courts whom we will simply call “CB” for now. Here’s what it feels like playing as CB’s partner: “son, I’m ashamed to be your father.” There you go. You’re always disappointing him. I’ve played with him numerous times where I just left feeling like a total liability, and I’m not alone in this.

    He’s actually a pretty fun guy off the court. He likes to chum it up with people by way of gentle self-deprecating jokes. I find I can always trust someone who is prone to self-deprecation. I think he’s in his early seventies, but seems really healthy. He moves well, and is a rock-solid player albeit a little on the crazy side. He’ll yell and shit. Not at you, necessarily, but mostly at himself. IF he yells at you, which I’ve seen/heard him do, he always apologizes and then like…does a 180. He’ll stop acting like an embarrassed father and be an actual fun guy to play with.

    Anyways, I was his partner yesterday and we faced the tandem of:

    PLAYER 1: Some half-decent rec player, firmly in the 2.5-3.0 range

    PLAYER 2: USA Pickleball gear, gnarly serve, backpack paddle case, 3.5+ no doubt

    Spanked. That. Ass.

    CB and I were fucking Brady and Moss with the ’07 Patriots. Batman and Robin. Jules and Vincent. Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Bert and motherfucking Ernie, baby.

    We started 0-5 when player 2 was still on the first serve, but man…I took the reigns and we went 4-5-1, then CB took over and we ended up 6-5-2…on the fifth or sixth point and I hit a gnarly-ass slam right in the sweet spot between them where neither one had a snowball’s chance in hell. “Elliot! Killer shot!” said one of the Challenge Court bros. We ended up winning like 11-8, and CB was loving it.

    Made my morning.

    Oh, so now you’re hot shit again and you’re sticking with the Costco Selkirk, huh?

    No. I’m still saving up for the new one. Right now I’m thinking the Selkirk LUXX Control Air Infinigrit. It’s $280. Could I go for a more middle-of-the-pack one? Sure. But again, I’m looking for a control paddle and this one seems awesome. Plus I’m saving up for it responsibly with patience, so…I’ll get wtf I want.

    Four posts in, time to start juicing up the site a bit

    Four posts in, time to start juicing up the site a bit.

    Maybe today I’ll toy around with a new layout. Maybe a new page or two? Start implementing the Newsletter feature? Maybe try and get a mf or two to subscribe? IDK. I’m brainstorming some ideas for the different pages, etc…aaand my cat is now laying in an impossible position on my lap. She’s too cute to move.

    Out!

  • #3: Saturday Open Play Reflections

    Slept like dogshit last night.

    I was up at 3:00am to use the restroom and walked into the hallway to see one of cats’ eyes glowing in the dark, sitting upright starting at me from down the hall. I hurried into the bathroom, took a piss, then hesitantly opened the door, half-expecting Sookie, our sweet, raccoon-looking little gray tabby, to be right outside the door with a knife hanging out of her mouth.

    I wasn’t able to fall back asleep until around 4:30am, and woke up for real this time four hours later. I also decided to bypass my morning coffee as a means of more relaxed play at Pickleball. I’ve done this before with great success.

    Not today mf.

    On Saturday and Sunday mornings, our local courts’ open play is usually loaded with rock-solid players. I look forward to it as an opportunity to challenge myself more without annoyingly choosing the partake in the normal “challenge court” part of weekday open play hours. Quickly on that: open play here is 0900-1200. There are six courts. Court #1 is reserved Mo-Fri as a “Challenge Court,” so the big guns don’t have to waste their time dispatching weaker players.

    There are days when I really want to sign up and give it a go; I’ve played with and against several of the usual players over there and have held my own pretty well at times. However I still lack the courage and this morning confirmed that, yes, I do still play like a jackass sometimes and yes, I would probably get slaughtered over there.

    I couldn’t find my serve. I was hitting it over just fine(ish), but it wasn’t the usual “holy shit” that I hear oftentimes when someone is returning it. And the dinking. The fucking DINKING! Net – net – net – net – net – net – net like Jesus, man. When the soft game starts to happen I’m just missing them lately.

    And fucking of course, this morning, my first like…four games were with and against the challenge-court types, and I stuck out like shit floating in a fruit bowl.

    Time for a new paddle

    The time is nigh for a new paddle, methinks. I’m realizing how I’m at a point in my game where I should invest in a higher-quality ax. I’m a power-hitter first, no doubt. And sometimes that works really well. I’ll send ’em back deep and fast, and people are all like “oh wow that was a hard hit,” or “wow that guy is a fucking STUD” or…just kidding. I do hit it hard and sometimes, on days where I’m really feeling it, I can aim it pretty well too. But I’m realizing how desperately I need to add control as part of my game. I get torn apart by older, less athletic players who just know exactly where to put the ball. I want that. This morning there were ample opportunities for me to just tap it over the net while my opponent was out of position and I ended up either sailing it out of bounds or simply tapping it into the net.

    So I looked up paddles, yada yada, more on this later…but I’m going to start saving up for one. 1% of every bi-weekly budget my wife and I do will go towards saving for a new paddle, and that’ll give me time to really dig into what the right fit for me could be.

    In Conclusion

    I played like trash this morning but still had fun. I also gained more clarity in my deficiencies, primarily lack of control, and I think that a paddle with a “wider sweet spot” is in my future.

    I also will go back to drinking coffee before I go play.

    Adios amigos.

  • #2: Liftoff

    I’m just gonna launch this mf. I’m sitting down to do some dedicated work on this blog, and WordPress is like “take your next steps and design your site!” Okay, so I decide to start doing that. I look at the site as is in this simple style of black and white and…simplicity…and I like it. I don’t expect any future readers (lol) to be as enamored with this minimalist style as I am, so I’ll fuck around with the overall site design at some point. For right now though I just want to write, and I’m launching this things and posting.

    How I got into Pickleball

    My wife and I were visiting her dad down in Texas (we live in Michigan) for Thanksgiving back in 2024. He’s retired, and one of the activities he found to stay social and active was Pickleball. He was telling us all about it, so my wife asked if he could take us since he had a few paddles (more on paddles in another post). We get there to open play, and the way this one works is you have this like…paddle holder….and you put your paddle in it and it just rotates after a game is finished. If your paddle is within the next four, you’re up! He went a little against the grain here and sought out someone who he thought would be a good teacher for us since it was our first time. I forgot her name, but she was an older, sweet lady, and we started “warming up” by “dinking” back-and-forth over the net. Not bad! I hit the ball over about half the time. Then we get to a real game where we had basically decided to clear up the rules/strategy/positions as we go. She serves to me right at the forehand, and given my casual tennis player background as a young teen, I returned that shit clean and low over the net with topspin and smoked her old ass. Of course I came back down to earth by knocking balls out to the back wall, into the net, off to the side, into the other court’s net, directly at people standing off to the side chatting, etc…but holy shit I had fun, and so did my wife.

    That was the only time we went during that trip. We fly back to Michigan where outdoor Pickleball doesn’t exist in the winter, and went on with out lives sans ball. Several months later, following the passing of the family matriarch in my wife’s grandmother (100 years old, incredible woman), we are back in Texas. We thought it would be good to get her dad out of the house and all of our minds elsewhere, so we go to open play. At this point we had both forgotten basically everything originally taught to us, but had a wonderful time relearning and getting to fire some killer forehands at the opponent. We get back to Michigan and decide for damn sure we’re going to start playing for real. The local park just opened up six beautiful outdoors courts the previous year, so we hit up Costco and for $60 got two Selkirk paddles, a bag, and three balls. As we weren’t confident in our playing yet, we avoided our local open play and opted to wait until July when my FIL would be visiting us.

    Wolverine Pickleball in Ann Arbor (cool ass place)

    My wife had found this place, Wolverine Pickleball, that offers these two-hour sessions of auto-generated games. The lowest-graded class we saw offered was 2.5-3.0, so we signed up for his birthday. Had a fucking blast. THEN…then…there’s a self-serve tap wall for you after you’re done, so we absolutely partook. After a couple hours of non-stop Pickleball, we really started figuring it all out. We went back once more during his visit and continued to notice little details in our playing that began to improve the more we played. Balls were still going all over Timbuktu, to be sure, but the rules, the scoring, basic strategy like getting to the Kitchen line were starting to actually sink in. More on Wolverine in another post. This place is amazing, and I’ll do a full-scale(ish) review of the joint.

    July-Oct 2025

    Here we are in October. I credit July as the month where Kaitlin (my wife) and I really began to get into the game. At this point we are frequently in attendance at our local open play and are really comfortable on the court. We even ventured into the 3.0-3.25 open play at Wolverine once (got smoked but held our own). In particular, I’m addicted. I go way more than she does, however I also have way more time on my hands, hence this blog. Conservatively I’m probably a 3.0 at a minimum. I’m known to have one of the nastier serves in town, it’s consistent, and I can drive the ball deep, fast, and mostly accurate. I can put spin on the ball from a forehand and backhand whenever I want, and I’m currently working to develop a consistent deep lob and work on having greater accuracy with aiming shots when at the kitchen line. I do get caught up pretty frequently in a bad position, and I’m still not totally confident on overall strategy, in particular from the serving-side’s standpoint.

    So that’s the post for today. I’m launching this thing.

  • #1: First post

    Alright, here we go. Post number 1. My goals with this are as follows:

    1. Have a creative writing outlet
    2. Commit to doing this for one full year
    3. Make $50.

    Ha! Yeah, the $50 would mean I’ve broken even, which would rock. It was like $48 dollars for the first year of this plan on WordPress, and thanks to my immense genius I misspelled the original domain name so had to buy this .blog domain for $2 and change.

    I’m not hoping, expecting or planning on this to be a financially fruitful endeavor…that isn’t my goal. I’m someone who has always had a love for writing, and oftentimes I find solace in taking time to jot down what is going on in my brain. It brings me a great deal of clarity.

    I’m a musician by trade. I have a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Music Performance. I was a really good trombone player growing up and I love being part of a team, so I dreamed of playing professionally in some large orchestra here in the states (or abroad for that matter). The goal for many of us Music Performance kids is to play and teach. More often than not it becomes teach and play. That’s where I’m at. I have my own small business operating a private lesson studio for low brass musicians, and I love it deeply. It’s something that brings me a great deal of meaning despite the lack of a hefty paycheck. I also have a great deal of respect for the freedom it provides for me.

    In moments when I reflect back and consider what else I could have tried my hand at professionally, the only other thing that comes to mind is writing. I’m not a STEM guy by any means. I was destined to carve my own path, and ultimately chose to do so holding a bass trombone. Writing, therefore, is something that I’ve always wanted to do as a hobby, however I simply never made the time to do it given all the other music-related things hijacking my consciousness. Hence the first goal: have a creative writing outlet. In this regard, by creating this blog and submitting this post, I have already accomplished 1/3 of my goals for this year. Now what to write about?

    I will save that story for another post. Here’s the gist:

    • Recreational tennis background
    • Introduced to Pickleball by my Father-in-law
    • Enjoys pickles
    • Has fun learning and playing the game
    • Becomes addicted

    This is a Pickleball blog. I’m an amateur (3.0?) Pickleball player. I desire to be a really damn good Pickleball player. I also desire to fucking blog about it baby, so let’s go!