The Relish

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.