Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

House Sitting Adventures: The dogs are pawing at the space in between the floor and the cabinet. There’s something stuck underneath. I get down and lie on the floor to see what all the fuss is about and pull out an Angry Birds chew toy. Still on my belly, I throw the toy over yonder to oblige the anxious, panting dogs and then immediately realize my fatal mistake: “You’re about to be stampeded and trampled on like Mufasa was by the antelopes in The Lion King!”

Thankfully, the thundering 25 lb cocker spaniels have the good sense to run around me in their mad chase to the toy, and by the time I’ve recovered from seeing my life flash before my eyes and have righted myself, the six dogs are once more beside me, tails wagging, toy dropped, ready for me to throw Angry Bird again.

I think a lot about why people play tennis. Because I often don’t understand why I play tennis. Why do people think tennis is fun when it brings so much…frustration? Is it the complaining? Is that the part that’s fun? That’s gotta be it. With how much complaining that goes on in weekend tennis, that makes the most sense. The actual tennis itself is secondary.

That is partially true (complaining is indeed very fun, but for the sake of this paragraph, I’m referring to the bit about tennis being secondary in why we play). A big part of why weekend tennis is fun for me has nothing to do with me playing. Between you and me, dear reader, I strongly dislike playing tennis. I really enjoy the idea of tennis though; for example, my favorite day of the week is Wednesday (“Guess what day it is!”), the day before most league’s scheduled match day. But oftentimes, playing the game itself feels like I’m stuck in a hamster cage, running in place, missing the same shots over and over and over again.

No, one of the best parts about recreational tennis is: all the soap opera storylines! Ooh, player A doesn’t like player B and now they’re playing each other. YES. Ooh, the prima donnas aka the best doubles duo on that team is facing off against the divas on the other team on line one two and it all comes down to their match. Delicious. But that’s another blog post for another day.

Back to why people play tennis. Well, a common theory in everyday real world life is that the more people are good at something, the more they enjoy it.

How is “good” calculated in weekend tennis? When one wins.

What, did you think I was going to say something else, perhaps something sarcastic about “good” and “weekend tennis”?

The people that run the tennis world – no, the actual administrators, not the grand wizards – see it my way, too. Everything about recreational tennis is geared towards ensuring its customers winning. Because winning = fun, and it’s very important to the weekend tennis industry to have its clients thinking tennis is fun and to keep playing tennis and to keep handing over money to play tennis.

That’s why people or teams who win all the time are bumped up. They’re winning too much. They’re ruining it for the others and making so many sad. The people who rarely win at a particular level are bumped down so they can be with players of more equal skill level. The goal for the people behind recreational tennis is to have parity: where everyone feels like they have a legitimate chance of winning when they step out onto the court, and everyone wins at least 50% of the time.

We weekend tennis players are on board with this winning thing, too. We’ll certainly help out the cause. That’s why we’ll pair ourselves up with only partners we feel comfortable playing with (aka can carry us); why we’ll surround ourselves with mostly players we’re confident we can beat; and why we’ll team hop until we’ve landed on a team (and flight) that fulfills both of the previous criteria.

Or, we’ll con our way onto a team that wins all the time so we’re free to lose at our own pace while not hurting the team’s overall goals. Then when we do win (broken clock…) and our team finishes in first place, what a total team effort, y’all! Yay, team!! Love this team!!!

There are people who smartly realize that trying to be actually good at tennis is a silly endeavor to pursue (you know, those players who “yell” at their opponents after losing soundly to them to get off their lawn and out of their flight). One does not have to be good at tennis to win one’s matches. While it’s true that there will always be people better than you, it’s also true that there will always be people worse than you. Those are the people we make sure we face (by playing in drastically different levels in the various city-spanning leagues that go on concurrently, for example) in between our frustrating (unintentional) losses because those are the matches we win. That’s why we tennis: because we play enough matches that delude us into thinking we’re good at this game and that we love it so.

~ Christy Vutam