Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

I hit tennis rock bottom the other day.

I brought it upon myself, of course. You see, dear reader, I am a tennis hypochondriac. I am constantly tinkering around with my strokes and am always in the process of learning a brand new stinkin’ technique because of my perpetual need to get better at tennis. Three months ago it was my serve. Currently, it’s my forehand groundstroke. In a few months, it’ll be my backhand groundstroke.

My volleys are a never-ending technique nightmare that I have yet to wake up from. And my overhead is a lost cause…so I will try to take every ball that remotely resembles an overhead instead of letting my doubles partner hit the surefire basic groundstroke because I believe that’s how I’ll overcome my overhead issue.

And after all the work that’s been put into my serve thus far, I still double fault at an alarming rate.

Sigh.

Just another lovely reason why you don’t want to be partnered up with me. You should let our captain know if you haven’t already.

Unless I’m our captain, um…

Tangent thought #1: Hey, have you ever wondered how many people on your tennis team have asked your captain to not be paired up with you?

Tangent thought #2: Good grief, you know what would be an excellent way to make sure you got partnered up with the one player on the team you want to play with? No, not tell the captain. Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t do that. Don’t be that player.

NO, what you should do is to piss off everyone else you’re paired up with till there’s only ONE person left on the team the captain can put you with. GENIUS.

You. You out there. You know who you are. And you are a genius. My hats off to you, madam.

So, anyway, I’m in the process of overhauling my forehand groundstroke, and…

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Last Friday morning, I drove into work while big flakes of snow were swirling down and powdering up the roads. I took the tollway with the logic that not having to brake and stop and turn on the treacherous pathways would be the best strategy for a safe drive. Not to mention it’d be the fastest route into the office.

I was wrong. Traffic slowed to a crawl as a two-car accident was being attended to by the cops on the left-most lane. As soon as I passed the wreckage, I vroomed back over to the passing lane. Other than the roads being wet, the snow didn’t appear to have much of an effect on the traveling conditions for this particular stretch of the tollway, and I figured it’d be an easy cruise the rest of the way into work with perhaps merely moments of the-car-is-slipping anxiousness that would ultimately prove innocuous…which I experienced earlier that week on my drive home from the office when it had sleeted and the roads were icy.

Suddenly, the white mini-SUV-jeep-looking vehicle in the right-most lane 30 yards in front of me lost control, turned 90 degrees to the left, drove straight into the rail, spun in place, and stopped in the middle of the left lane. That I was on.

Because I had just left the scene of a car accident and perhaps because of how fast I had been going, I had time to slow down and check behind me, veer into the middle lane without incident, and continue safely past the vehicle with its severely damaged front-end and its no-doubt traumatized passengers inside. And then I exited the tollway.

So that was my Friday, February 27th. How was yours?

The weather has been quite the hot topic of interest for the recreational tennis players of the Dallas/Ft. Worth area recently. Last week was the first week for several of the local community tennis leagues. Mother Nature could not have cared less. Or maybe she did care and she was purposefully screwing with everyone. However you want to look at it.

The real flurry of fun was the heated discussion of having to play during these conditions. Thursday, Feb. 26 was the first day for the weekday ladies section of the Tennis Competitors of Dallas (TCD) league, and it was the only day of the week when precipitation wasn’t in the forecast.

But it would be cold. Like in-the-30s-but-it-feels-like-it’s-in-the-20s cold. With 20 mph winds.

TCD doesn’t have a rule on not playing because of non-precipitous weather (cold, wind, heat). Like that’s the actual rule:

Page 35, under Section K. Weather Conditions, under item 2: “There are no provisions for extreme cold, heat, or wind.”

Which means you’re supposed to play.

Wouldn’t you know it, but this did not sit well with the grown women who can play recreational adult tennis on a weekday morning.

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