Had the 24 players out that day been picking teams, I would have been the last person standing. “I guess Cam has to be on my team,” someone might say. “What’s the point in even playing,” another might add.

When I was a kid, I was competent enough at sports to never be the last one picked. In hindsight, it was cruel to leave one person standing alone. Maybe the worst players should have been the captains. Remember when Phil Kessel was the last person picked at an NHL All-Star game? I felt badly for him, although he did receive a car. Maybe we should have given the kids in my day a dinky toy.

With my whiffs and falls, I definitely felt out of place playing pickleball, especially since these were advanced players. I clearly didn’t belong. I do recall a couple of other times when I felt like this, but in a slightly different way. Once was when I was playing hockey for my elementary school. I was an awful skater and played on the third line with a couple of other awful skaters. I am not sure how I/we made the team. I should mention that the coach was not a teacher.

Unlike kids’ hockey today, where it is encouraged/mandated at some levels that players get equal ice time, our coach would put us on every now and again. We would play against the other team’s horrible skaters. If both coaches played all out to win, we seldom got on the ice.

The real kicker was when the playoffs started and our coach gathered the three of us to say our services would no longer be needed.

The same man coached my baseball team that summer. In the first game, I dropped a fly ball and he yelled at me. Rightly or wrongly, I quit before he cut me. I was better at baseball than hockey, but so be it.

Years and years later, I saw the coach at a mall. He was frail and walking with a cane. There was a side of me that wanted to say, “Mister So and So, do you remember kicking me off your hockey team and screaming at me in front of my friends at a baseball game?” What would be the point of doing that? In hindsight, I should have said, “I once played on your hockey and baseball teams. How are you? And how are your sons?”

Anyway, I played quite a bit of tennis in the 1980s, so I thought the transition to pickleball wouldn’t be as difficult as it has been. It turns out pickleball is a bit more like table tennis than tennis.

Pickleball is played on what is basically half a tennis court. It is most commonly played in a doubles format. That meant someone had to be my partner. The winning team in a game puts their rackets in a gold box, and the losers into a silver one. The bottom four rackets in each box are pulled out and the next game begins. Those four people would go to a court, form teams and play. I wondered if my racket was being avoided.

In one game that day, I was first paired with one of the best players. He was a quiet but encouraging guy. We won the game, despite my many flaws. I was in the gold box! That meant my next game would be against gold players.

I played on the same team as a not-so-friendly guy. I had played against him earlier. Just before he served to me in that game, he asked if I was new. He said he would take it easy on me. I motioned with my hand to bring it on. I wasn’t good, but I didn’t want sympathy from this guy or anyone else. That might have been the time when I fell into the wall. Bring it on, indeed.

The experience that day left me hesitant to go back and try again. Who wants to be THAT guy? A couple of weeks later, I noticed there were sessions for a mixture of advanced players and those of lesser calibres. I went and was told by one of the advanced players that less-experienced players were on the other side
of a curtain. I walked over, peeked through the curtain and there was nobody there. I shook my head, chuckled and went back to join the main group.

I am getting a bit better, thanks mostly to two good players who hit balls one-on-one with me. Another player, with whom I have two wins, has given me technical and positioning advice.

I really do like the game, and love the exercise. If only I could stop knocking down walls.

-Cam Hutchinson