Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

Captaining takes a lot out of me.

So last fall I realized it’s up to me to create an adult recreational tennis team I want to captain, that people can’t read my mind and don’t magically become the team players I want them to be. I’ve now got team rules to weed out players who would cause extraneous headaches for me as I once more assume the already inherently soul-crushing role of captainship.

As each season brings about new sets of captain-player problems, I keep adding rules.

There is no doubt that I will end up weeding out everyone on the planet and then I won’t have enough players to lord over captain. And my oh my, what a glorious feeling that will be.

The only reason why I still captain is because people keep saying yes. Like enough people to form a team with say yes. As soon as I alienate those people and I don’t have enough players to field a competitive weekly line-up with, I will stop captaining and then I will stop playing tennis for a while.

Every time I say that to someone, they laugh and roll their eyes as if I would actually stop playing tennis. Um, no. I’m being serious. Captaining makes me want to stop playing team tennis.

That’s how much out of me captaining takes.

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Here is a list of tennis etiquette rules every person who picks up the ole tennis racquet should know when it comes to playing tennis.

Some of these are actual but commonly violated rules that can be found in either the International Tennis Federation (ITF) Rules of Tennis and/or The Code. Together, those two handbooks govern most tennis leagues and tournaments.

Some of these are not stated in either of those doctrines but are the unwritten, common courtesy guidelines that are often breached by inexperienced players.

You all are most welcome!

In no particular order:

• Practice matches are two hours long at a minimum. That’s how long it takes to play a worthwhile for-fun match. If you don’t have two hours to play tennis, let the organizer know you’ll only be able to play for an hour and a half and see if she’s cool with that. And if you can’t play for at least an hour and a half, you can’t play at all.

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• 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… 😉

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Whoo-hoo, tennis is back, ba-by! The two non-USTA cities-spanning team tennis doubles leagues in my area start this week: TCD today and Metro this Saturday. But it’s TCD that holds a special place in my heart – it’s the league in which flocks of grown-up women recreational tennis players will be flouncing to their respective tennis match sites all uniformly decked out as a team in whatever tennis apparel the major sportswear corporations convinced them was the absolute latest in tennis fashion.

Basically those corporations mixed and matched any two colors together with the sole criteria being: the louder the better. They’re no dummies. They know their core audience.

And so I present to you my second post (here’s the first) centered around that one tennis must-have that adult women tennis teams have been working oh-so-hard to get just right this off-season. I am shocked it’s not the serve.

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• There’s nothing like taking a private tennis lesson to humble the rice pudding out of you.
• I very rarely leave a tennis lesson or a drill pleased with my game. I’m totally the Tim Tebow of weekend tennis. I’m awful in practice yet I inexplicably have won in match play (#WhosCarryingMeThisTime). I’m convinced more than ever that I’m rated as I am simply because I’m more athletic than most people who play recreational tennis are. I’m clearly doing tennis wrong. My coaches and I are still stuck on how to hit groundstrokes. And what the right grip is. Ugh, my grip. There’s a mark on my racquet grip that corresponds with a mark on my fist so I know how I’m supposed to hold my racquet. If you watch me closely while I’m playing a match, sometimes you’ll see me glance down at my racquet in mid rally to see if the marks match up.

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• The Real Housewives of Tennis: this delightful blog post about the weekend tennis scene in Nashville and its effect on unsuspecting domestic engineers and 401K-compensated women proves it’s not all just in my head. However, I am unclear on the whole “lunch that the other team brings” bit. What’s this about lunch being provided? And here I am getting all giddy when my team plays at country clubs that have complimentary Goldfish…
• Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had a Take Your Dog to Tennis Day? An actual thought I had when I brought my dog to a match I was playing. What a silly idea, right? Tennis balls flying everywhere and people running around willy-nilly: yeah, there is no way most dogs would sit nicely during all this delicious movement. Had there been other dogs at the tennis facility in honor of Take Your Dog to Tennis Day, my dog would have barked incessantly instead of being bored out of her mind.
• If your dog was watching you play tennis, do you think he/she would say, “Wow, she never moves that fast in real life” or “Yup, that dawdling looks about right”?

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• Sometimes I’ll watch someone hit a forehand and cringe as the body and racquet are seemingly at war with one another and there’s awkward contact made with the ball. I’ll shake my head all dramatic-like at the terrible display of tennis form. Later at work, I’ll be listening to a song and start dancing to it…until I catch a reflection of my nonrhythmic self in the glass and think, “Touché, world. Touché.”

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• A tennis class of adult beginners is learning how to hit forehands on the adjacent court. Every other word out of the teaching pro is “Excellent!”, “Good!”, or “That was beautiful!” I’m having to duck as the class’s balls come raining down on my side of the fence. If the teaching pro’s goal was to drum up more business for herself, then she’s doing a stupendous job because if she thinks that was beautiful, then I can’t wait to hear what she has to say about my shots. Mine actually go over the net now. On the same court even. I would definitely pay to have a teaching pro tell me how awesome my strokes are for once.

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