Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

I love USTA playoffs. The stressful, high stakes weekend (punctuated by the captain gripping with one hand her bullhorn, in the other her clipboard, and with her teeth her whistle) is the best, most efficient way to learn whether you absolutely love playing with a certain teammate or hate playing with a certain teammate and I AM NOT COMING BACK IF SHE IS STILL ON THE TEAM, CAPTAIN, SO YOU NEED TO MAKE A CHOICE RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, IT’S EITHER HER OR ME YOU HEAR ME.

Ahem.

Love the playoffs.

For the first time in my captaining career, I had a USTA team finish first in its regular season flight. Make that two teams. That’s right, dear reader! Both my 4.0 (yes, the one I don’t play for but practice the most with) and my 4.5 (the one I do play for and quite a bit because I am terrible at recruiting) teams won their respective regular season flights this past fall season. HECK YEAH.

AND THEN my 4.5 team won their one-match-winner-take-all-playoff showdown (as opposed to the usual attrition-filled, multiple matches over the course of 24 hours fare) to become the champions of the fall season. WHAT UP!!!!

I, for one, can play tennis for hours!!!! Let’s test this theory out, Chriiiissssttttyyyy!!!!

(Someone made a most stupendous point about weekend tennis tournaments: if your tennis team is in a flight of 4 and the format is round robin and you play every guaranteed match – generally spanning Friday night through Saturday early afternoon – you’re basically playing 3 matches in 24 hours. WHO SIGNED OFF ON THIS????)

((In case anyone of Dallas Tennis Association authority is reading this [as opposed to my actually emailing them directly], I would have preferred at least 3 matches worth of 4.5 playoffs even if it was against the same team so I could have played everyone on my team. While I think the playoff tournament format is odd given the clientele in particular, if we’re already gonna have a tennis-filled weekend, the more guaranteed matches the better, so says the playing-time-juggling, player-appeasing captain part of me.))

The high from winning playoffs lasted all of five minutes, however. We didn’t receive our Area/Cities Championship scarves till the following week when I handed them out individually out of the trunk of Blueberry, my car (much like dated reference Master P did when he innovatively used a guerrilla-style marketing campaign of selling his rap tapes out of his car’s behind directly to possibly interested neighborhoods in order to better build up word-of-mouth buzz), so I sadly do not have a team photo of everyone together donning their cute navy and white scarves with one knee turned, hands on hips, and boobs out that would have clearly screamed RECREATIONAL ADULT TENNIS BADACES RIGHT HERE.

Sadness.

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