Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

If you haven’t signed up, yet, for the USTA team you told the captain or the co-captain you would join this spring/summer (real USTA is only a couple of months away; YES!), you are making your captain nervous. Yes, the league starts in April for men and in May for women and mixed. Yes, there’s no deadline to sign up. But dear goodness in Heaven, what if someone swoops in, whispers sweet nothings in your ear, and steals you away? WHAT IF THAT HAPPENS?!

Of all the things that weekend warrior tennis players do that bother me, not signing up for the team they agreed to play on within a week or two after the email has been sent out (believe you me, every USTA team captain has emailed her bunch of Froot Loops a registration number by now) is actually not one of them. Not anymore, anyway. I’ve been down this road before; for my last USTA tennis team, both my captain and I were texting, calling, and emailing the stragglers the day before deadline. Thanks, guys.

People are inherently lazy, and I’m not going to even bother to chase people down this time around. Players will meander onto the Internet at some point. It’s noble that they’re trying to cut back on being on the web so much and have been offline for more than two weeks though. Plus, I bet they didn’t budget the $33 USTA team registration fee for this month, but after those players cut back on a tanning appointment or two, they’ll have room for this latest team tennis expense any month now.

The teams I’m on surely aren’t the only ones with nervous captains. There are dozens of teams listed at each USTA level, but some don’t have even one player registered. You half-wonder whether those teams will make (of course, they will). With no one signed up, does my team still have a chance at landing the best player of that projected team? People with teams need to register now so captains and their band of merry racquet-wielding dolls know which star free agents are left and can be pursued whole hog.

Alas, only a player or two in the tennis community trickles onto the USTA website each day and signs up while every hour of every day captains are refreshing each team’s page to gauge those teams whose rosters are not yet complete against theirs whose own players may ultimately decide to pursue a chef career and enroll at a culinary institute instead. They cook so much now to feed their families. Let’s not waste what seems to be their one true skill set!

That’s actually probably why captains are anxious for their players to register. No, not because they’re concerned they’ll lose their players to culinary classes. They know all the captains are doing the same thing they are with the refreshing of the webpage and the gauging of the rosters, and they want to strike fear into opposing teams now. Each player signing up is a shot across the bow of that community’s weekend tennis landscape. “Oh, no, you have that doubles stud on your team? And this other amazing player? Not that singles ringer, too! Bummer. I guess I’ll be stressing the importance of having fun to my team this season then…”

It’s never too early to win the tennis match, y’all.

But back to the players who haven’t signed up, yet: maybe those that still haven’t registered are consciously waiting because they want to be showered with desperate compliments from their teammates and captains as they’re being groveled and pleaded with to sign up. It’s nice to feel needed and important.

Or, maybe they don’t understand how to register. I agree that the USTA website is an unwieldy monstrosity. Let me help you out. The USTA TennisLink website is here. Click on “Register For A Team,” which is on the left-hand side of the middle section in a blue rectangle. You’re going to need to know your USTA membership number, which is listed on your USTA membership card in your wallet/purse. Or,  you may have smartly emailed yourself the number or saved it in a text draft so you could quickly find it.

I know; I know. There, there. Technology is hard (we’re ignoring the fact that you’ve signed up for multiple teams a year for the last several years). Thank goodness you’re wanted only for your ability to see a ball and hit it, huh?

~ Christy Vutam