My daughter, Celeste, and I had overly optimistic expectations of how great we'd be at Pickleball. Since this racquet sport is sort of a cross between tennis and ping pong, both of which each of us has played a lot of, we figured that Pickleball would be a breeze for us.
Well, we were partly correct.
It was a breezy day at the Pickleball courts at Black Butte Ranch in central Oregon, where Celeste, me, my granddaughter Evelyn, and Laurel, my wife, tried the sport for the first time.
That enabled me to blame some of my many mistakes on the wind, a skill I learned in competitive tennis -- along with blaming bad shots on a worn-out ball, poor stringing on my racquet, or anything that came to mind other than my lack of skill.
We did have fun.
Pickleball is great exercise, and the small court makes it easy to walk over and retrieve balls that were mishit. At first I had a lot of trouble figuring out how high the ball would bounce, since it is way less bouncy than a tennis ball or ping pong ball.
The reduced bounciness meant that I had to bend my senior citizen knees considerably deeper than I would have had to do playing tennis. I also quickly found that you've got to hit the ball pretty damn hard or it dribbles harmlessly into the net.
Anyway, here's Evelyn's cinematic masterpiece.
At 12 years old she's way more accomplished with an iPhone and its apps than I am. That said, I recommended a horizontal video, but she and Celeste were focused on Instagram, which, being an old guy, I don't use, preferring Facebook. Hence, a vertical video.
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