Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

Player Christy is losing her singles match. It’s the 2016 USTA spring season. Of course she is.

The unfamiliar faces of teammates I met an hour ago shortly before the lineup was exchanged are clustered just outside my court. I look helplessly at them as they try to cheer me on towards a comeback that never begins. Drenched in sweat and stinking of tennis ineptitude, I am making a fine first impression on my fellow “super team” teammates.

Yes. That’s right, dear reader. Yours truly is on a “super team,” one of those USTA tennis teams made up mostly of several of the area’s badaces of a particular USTA rating, handpicked by a visionary ringleader, with the attainable goal of advancing all the way to Nationals.*

*Each of us received the exclusive invitation upon discovering a new can of tennis balls in our tennis bags; on the cap was emblazoned the Captain Morgan emblem along with the inscription of the USTA team number.

Well, it’s a good thing I’m surrounded by super team teammates. It’s a good thing all of them can actually play tennis well and take care of business. Good thing because I am losing my singles match to a player rated lower than me.

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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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This fall is the sixth season I will have captained a tennis team, and for the first time in my team tennis captainship, I will be out of town and out of pocket for at least one of the matches.

Hold me.

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So I’ve never understood the USTA Playoffs.

Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE USTA Playoffs. I love pretty much everything about it. First of all, I personally do stupid well during the Playoffs…to the point where opponents will want to play me again after that weekend only to be very disappointed at my true tennis abilities when playoff testosterone isn’t coursing through my veins and I’m playing very much within my mind.

But what I really love is how much heightened everything is. This is recreational adult league tennis at its finest. I love the do-or-die atmosphere. I love the tension. I love the captains who hover around the tournament desk to try to sneak peaks at the opposing teams’ line-ups (captains are awful human beings. Watch out for that).

I love the people who are most certainly not treating the poor person running the tournament desk like they themselves would want to be treated and who need to know what’s going on RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW at all times (see my last parentheses).

I love that opposing players will glare at me when they think I’m over-cheering my players (there’s no such thing as over-cheering during playoff tennis).

And I love, love the camaraderie. You will never love your teammates more than when you are pulling for them with all your heart and soul to win their very important, very big deal tennis matches.

What I don’t love about USTA Playoffs, however, is the structure.

It confounds me.

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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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If you look up my USTA league record on USTA TennisLink as I do before bed each night, you will notice that I am winless in 4.5 league doubles since November of 2013 through this very moment.*

*Technically I’ve won one match…when I played against two 4.0s…with a 4.5 doubles partner…sooooo…

That’s right. I haven’t won a 4.5 USTA league doubles match in over a year.

What’s worse is that starting with the USTA 2014 spring/summer league playoffs through the time of this writing, I have won all my 4.5 USTA singles matches.**

**Never you mind that three of the last four singles matches came down to match tiebreaks, which means I got some seriously lucky bounces. Stop raining on the point I’m trying to make.

This is why I captain a 4.5 USTA team.

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Captaining USTA tennis teams drains the life force out of me. A little part of my soul dies every second I spend on captaining. It is exhausting. I would never advise anyone to captain a recreational adult tennis team. It sucks. In so many ways.

My dog likes to circle behind me as I’m making my way around the house when she thinks we’re about to go on a road trip. I think it’s the herding mentality in her Sheltie DNA; she’s making sure she has me in her sights at all times and that I’m on the right path and not straying from the plan.

“Nope! You are not going back up the stairs, Christy, because I will block you from turning around! All forty pounds of me. That tops off at your knees. When I sit.

“Darn the construction limitations of my dog-body!”

Captaining a team is like herding. Constantly, constantly, constantly herding. Sometimes it seems like I’m the only person in a face-to-face interaction that remembers the part where I asked you about playing on this team next spring season and you said yes. And then a few months later when I blithely check in as a simple formality, you don’t have any recollection of that conversation and have joined another team.

See, a great captain would have had all these player-tennis team commitments set in stone, signed in blood complete with monthly reminders. I merely, haplessly continue to play this violin as the boat is sinking.

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There’s some angst among my area’s USTA tennis players and captains about this weekend’s playoff tournament because rain is in the forecast and the local league office decided that they still wanted to get the City Championship in and done with. They’re getting ahead of the weather and now all matches will be played indoors. There wouldn’t be a better weekend the rest of the year than Nov. 21-23, the Dallas Tennis Association officials reckoned, to fit in a tennis tournament of this size and magnitude that involves, no doubt, a ton of moving parts and logistics.

Here’s where it gets good though: due to the limited availability of indoor tennis courts, the powers that be made the playoff pool smaller and removed all the second place teams from advancing.

GASP.

😯

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One of the supposed perks of being a captain is that you can choose who you want to play doubles with, which would imply that whomever I deign as deserving as being on the same court as myself is probably one of the best players on the team. Captains are not totally stupid. Well actually, a captain’s partner might be one of the worst players or one of the least enjoyable people to play with, and the captain is taking (yet another) one for the team.

For the record, I’m not totally stupid.

I do have players on my team that I very much would like to play doubles with, people I wouldn’t otherwise play doubles with in a real match (which kills me because what is the point of playing tennis if it’s not recorded anywhere for opposing captains to gaze at and go “Ooh, who is Christy’s partner?”) because this is the only tennis team we’re on together.

So this is perfect, right? I captain a tennis team comprised of people I want to play doubles with and whatdoyaknow I’m in charge of the line-up and it’s the most awesome power in the world. Nay, the universe. That’s how that works, right?

There are three cities-spanning team tennis leagues for women in my area. There are three leagues I could have possibly captained a team in. Being the brilliant person that I am, I captain a team in the one league that requires singles. I am a moron.

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As a captain of recreational adult tennis teams, I am obligated to do something called “research.” Players will say something like “I trust my captain to do the proper research, put out the right line-up, and lead our team to first place.”

Sometimes my teams will do quite well and the players will credit me for doing a terrific job of this thing called “research.”

Sometimes I will tell my team, “Okay, let me do some research and crunch some numbers, and I’ll get back to you all on the line-up as soon as I can.”

Can I tell you a secret? I have no idea what doing “research” entails.

I say I do research just cause it sounds like something I should be doing. Like I’m not just throwing spaghetti against a wall and seeing which strands of noodles and meatballs win their three-set coin flips. Then when one of those coin flip wins turn out to be the deciding match, I end up looking like a mad genius with amazing captaining prowess who did an excellent job of “researching.”

Maybe I’m doing it wrong. For me, doing “research” means mindlessly clicking through the faceless names on the opposing team and glancing at meaningless scores against more names I don’t recognize. For hours.

This is what I do instead of finding a cure for cancer.

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