Bio of Del Friesen. I have been playing Pickleball since 2013 or 2014 when it was first starting in Oakmont. I grew up in India where my parents were missionaries.  Both grade school and high school were at boarding school, Woodstock, in Northern India.  Surprisingly, a handful of my former boarding school classmates live in the Bay Area.  One, Gabriel Campbell, has become an Oakmonter. I returned to the the US for college in 1965.

I married Anna in 1968.  In 1969 we traveled to Zambia where we taught in a rural High School for 3 years and where our son was born. Our daughter was born my first year of graduate school at Indiana University, Bloomington where I received my PhD in Chemistry.  

My first corporate job was with Corning Glass in their research facility.  In 1987 we moved to Huntington Beach, CA, where I worked for a small company that made adhesives for the electronic industry, Ablestik Laboratories.  

I fully retired in 2013 so that we could move closer to our kids and only granddaughter here in the Bay Area.  We found Oakmont to be close but not too close to our kids and have enjoyed meeting all the interesting people here.
My interests are photography, cooking Indian food, and picking our 9 year old granddaughter up from school in Oakland once a week.

My advice to new pickleball players is have fun and don’t run backward. My favorite quote is my old school motto: “Palma non sine pulvere” or loosely translated : No palms of victory without the dust of struggle.