Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

• One of my high school teachers said that to purposefully get every question wrong on a multiple choice exam was harder than it seemed. If anyone pulled off the feat, he would give that student a 100. This challenge created a bit of a buzz in the classroom, but of course, no one took him up on it.

For whatever reason, that memory surfaced recently, and now I’m tempted to see if I can manipulate my line-ups so that my oblivious team will lose every line, every match.

Obviously, the first step in losing every line, every match would be to not play me, um… 😉

• Man, I love it when players tell me they think a captain can play as often as she wants because she has to do all this work and put up with all this nonsense…I love it because the punchline that’s left unsaid to the statement “I believe that the captain should be able to play as often as she wants” is, of course, “…but not at the expense of my playing time.”
• New Rule For My Tennis Teams #1: If you have to add unavailable dates after your initial “I’m unavailable these dates” response that has nothing to do with a family member’s health, you owe me chocolates with nuts. Each additional unavailable date is another set of chocolates with nuts.

I don’t joke about candy.

Clearly, there are other perfectly acceptable, blind-siding, horrible, unspeakable emergency situations out of your control that I haven’t listed here that you are excused from owing me chocolates for, but any situation in which you either are suddenly going on a family vacation or for fun outing, or you didn’t read the original email with the times listed closely and it’s now just dawned on you three days before battle that oh, I need to pick up my husband’s dry cleaning promptly an hour after the match starts, or you signed up to do something else voluntarily, then you owe me chocolates. With nuts.

And if you tell me you’re unavailable for that week because of something not dire after I listed you in the line-up, now we’re talking appetizers.

• New Rule For My Tennis Teams #2: You must be available for at least half the matches in order to sign up for the team. No, wait. You must be available for 75% of the matches in order to sign up for the team. Inevitably, something will come up during the season so there goes 25% of your playing dates but you’d still be good to play for half the matches.

I just want to make sure there’s no more miscommunication where I asked you to play on the team, you said “YES!”, and then I thought you’d actually be playing and you’re like, “Um, I only agreed to be on the team.”

• New Rule For My Tennis Teams #3: If you can’t go to lunch, you’re not available. Unless you win your match. If you win your match, then you’re begrudgingly excused from lunch. If you lose, you absolutely have to go to lunch. Don’t you be slinking away because you’re embarrassed or mad and you don’t want to be around other people. The rest of us lost, too, ya know.
• Lunch is a big deal to me. Lunch is what separates us from the animals. When we play tennis, we are not ourselves. Going to lunch, however, lets everyone get to know one another, lets us laugh with each other, and lets us bond. Otherwise, we’re just a bunch of strangers who barely look at each other once a week while a crazy person – the captain – is yelling at everyone about warming up properly. Otherwise, you are clearly just using me to get your cardio in for the day.
• If you win the first set but it takes you three sets to win the match, drinks are on you.
• There is a difference between “I will play with anyone” and “I can play with anyone.”
• My favorite, bestest response I have ever received about partnerships:

“Christy, I will play wherever you want me and will do my best. I’m pretty versatile. Put who you know will do well and give me the leftover. I’m pretty confident…I can usually play with most on any line.”

I understand full well why most people don’t have this attitude when it comes to tennis doubles partnerships, which is why it’s a delightful breath of fresh air when I encounter someone who does.

• I’m always antsy about putting a new partnership together because there will only be one first time playing together for the two of them. If they win, then that buys me a few more times to play them together even if they lose the next time out. Lose that first match, however, and it can be tough to recover from that negative experience. That partnership is probably doomed; they will probably never click; and that’s one less possible winning partnership for the team. And it’s all because of me. Great job, Captain!

I’m being totally serious. I’m one of those people who worry about their roles and influence on the outcomes of such things. Similarly, I’ll stop watching a match my players are trailing in because clearly, my presence is causing them to lose.

• Let’s say everyone had a clone. An exact everything clone. You know those players that captains have a hard time pairing up with because most if not all of their teammates would prefer not to play with them? Would those players enjoy partnering up with themselves? Or would they be equally as annoyed with themselves as other people are?
• I have always thought I would not like me as a doubles partner. Nor could I stand myself if I were to watch me play. A lot of antics to put up with, starting with that backward hat wearing, Cheshire Cat grinning, crowd pointing, fist pumping…

And that’s when things are going well. Let’s not detail again the antics I pull when things are going poorly…

Speaking of which, here’s an update on my dancing on the court idea: it’s working. Going into a match deliriously happy has changed my tennis and mental game for the better. Playing joyfully, gleefully suits me. Even when I’ve lost, I’ve left the court in high spirits. In fact, teammates of mine, if you guys could casually play music during my matches so I can sway to and fro as I’m in the ready position or so I can jauntily make my way to my spot for the next point and be bustin’ moves as I have been doing, that would really help the cause…

…as well as my on-the-court antics reputation. Hee.

A teammate told me a couple of weeks ago she can always tell when I’m winning because of how loud I am. I am loud when I am happy. So when I’m purposefully deliriously happy…

Although this does make me wonder if I have played terribly but left cheerily oblivious because of my sublime mental state.

• Playing rock-paper-scissors to determine who serves first is fun. Shout-out to Christina for setting the tone for our awesome match. 😀
• My favorite excuse given to me by players after a loss is that the other team were just so bad. SO BAD. Such weak balls. That lobbing nonsense. They were awful, Christy! They weren’t good. They were so bad that we lost to them. THAT’S HOW BAD THEY WERE.
• My dog gets really excited on the weekends. She’s always all up in my grill midday Saturday and Sunday because she knows I don’t have anything better to do than to take her somewhere. She won’t let me out of her sight, and she’s whining at me and whining at me, and then finally, I’ll get her leash and she’s full on barking her head off now because it’s all so very exciting and we get in the car and we arrive at our trip’s end and then…

…she’s whining at me ten minutes later because she doesn’t like where we went. Because my attention is elsewhere and I’m not playing with her. Because eight-year-old girls want to walk her. Because the dogs that are present don’t pass the sniff test for whatever reason and she won’t play with them.

There’s a metaphor there about my dog and how anxious and demanding she is to go somewhere and how disappointed she is upon the destination because the conditions aren’t exactly to her liking that I want to make about recreational team tennis players, but I just can’t quite put my finger on what that would be…

• And finally, randomly, someone was telling me about one-half of her opposing doubles team. That this opponent bombed the ball at least twice at my tennis friend and her partner without announcing to them that she was giving them the ball in between points. That those balls nearly missed taking out my tennis friend in the neck and the head on each respective smash. That this opponent’s own partner was aghast and had to tell her she couldn’t do that sort of thing. That my tennis friend’s partner told my tennis buddy to not do anything retaliatory so as to not engage the crazy person because she was clearly the type who would key their cars in the parking lot.

I really want to ask people I know on this crazy person’s tennis team about their teammate, but I suppose there’s no good way of asking, “Is it true you have a crazy person on your team?”