Monday nights I play with a group at the JCCA here in Austin — about 30 people total, though tonight it's a smaller crowd of 12 signed up. Above-average skill level across the board, and if I'm honest, most of them are better than me. That's just the reality of this particular group, and I've made my peace with it.
Going in, I kept the goals simple. Three of them, in order: stay hydrated, stay standing, and walk away without carrying too many bad thoughts about the games I'm going to lose. Notice none of those goals are "win." When you know you're the weaker player in most of your matchups, the scoreboard stops being the useful measure of how the night went.
Playing up
There's real value in getting outmatched on a regular basis. Every rally against someone with more consistency or better hands is a small lesson, even in the games that end lopsided. I don't come home from Monday nights with a great win-loss record, but I come home having seen shots and patterns I wouldn't see anywhere else in my rotation.
The mental part is the harder discipline, honestly. It's easy to let a string of losses turn into a string of bad thoughts about your own game. The goal of walking away without too much of that isn't about pretending the losses don't happen — it's about not letting them follow me out the door.
Why it's worth it anyway
What makes it worth showing up isn't the score. It's a fun group — people from the neighborhood, familiar faces, a good way to kick off the week. That community piece matters as much as anything that happens on the court. Some nights I leave having lost more games than I can count and still feel like it was a good Monday.