Elan's 340 Blog

Pickleball For this “Random” blog post, I wanted to share a little about my favorite sport currently: pickleball. Pickleball is taking the world by storm right now and is the fastest-growing sport in the United States. In this blog post, I will take you through the origin of pickleball, how to play it, and why it is the hottest sport right now.  Origin of Pickleball Pickleball started in 1965 in Bainbridge Island, Washington. One summer day, Joel Pritchard came home from playing golf with his friend Bill Bell. They sought to entertain their kids so they decided to play badminton. However, they couldn’t find the right equipment and improvised by playing with ping pong paddles, a wiffle ball, and a badminton net. They started to play and realized that this could be an actual game. The next weekend, they invited their friend Barney McCallum to play with them, and they created the rules for the game. Once the rules were in place they had to come up with a name. They eventually decided ...

The book Open is an autobiography written by former tennis player Andre Agassi. He takes us through the ups and downs of his life and what he dealt with as a tennis player. He started playing tennis at the age of 7 and hated it from the day he started. His dad forced him to play and at 13 he was sent to the intense Nick Bollettieri Tennis School to practice hours every day. Agassi’s hatred for the game caused him to rebel and he would soon start drinking and smoking and even had a pink mohawk. He kept pushing through, however and dropped out of school to turn pro at the age of 15. Agassi was able to win 3 grand slams (the most coveted tennis tournaments) before he fell into depression in 1997. His troubled marriage with Brooke Shields led him to feel empty and he started doing crystal meth to escape it. In 1997, he infamously failed a drug test, however, he sent a letter to the Tennis Association claiming he took it unknowingly. The Association gave him a warning, but Agassi revealed i...

From Hero to Zero How the Los Angeles Lakers went from championship favorites to fighting for a spot in the playoffs Do you like ice cream? What about pizza? How about hamburgers? I’m sure you do. Almost everybody does. But what if you put all of those together and had a pizza and hamburger ice cream sundae. Would you like that? I hope not. Well, that’s kind of what you have right now with the Los Angeles Lakers–a star-studded roster that doesn’t compliment each other in any way and has thus led to a disaster of a season. However, this was not how it was supposed to go. This Lakers team was supposed to be in title contention, not clawing its way into the playoffs. But there were a lot of things that led up to this shameful fate. In this article, I will discuss what the expectations for the Lakers were at the beginning of the season, where they went wrong, how their season is going, and give a little insight on how I believe the rest of the season will play out for them. Preseason Expe...

When I found out that for our first book we had to choose from a list of memoirs–I was stoked as memoirs are my favorite type of book. As I scoured through the list of books we were given, there were a few that caught my eye, however, I remembered that there was a memoir I had really been meaning to read–Open by Andre Agassi. I immediately reached out to Professor Hansen to see if I could read it as a substitute and he gave me the green light. There were many reasons why I wanted to read this book. For one, I have played tennis since I was only eight years old and I wanted to read about what it would be like to become a professional tennis player. Also, my parents and grandparents were big Andre Agassi fans, and we would watch his matches together when I was a kid. Lastly, this book has been recommended to me by so many different people so I wanted to see what the hype was about. Before reading the book, I already knew it talked about Agassi’s struggles with anxiety and depression and ...