Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

As I’m sure is the case in your area, my area has non-USTA, cities-spanning leagues with a flight-ladder system to pass the time in between USTA seasons. Finish last and your tennis team moves down a flight. Finish first or even second and your tennis team moves up a flight.

With one last week of matches to go in such a league, one of the tennis teams I play on will for sure-for sure be finishing first in its flight this season.

“HAHA, SUCKERS!”

Is what the rest of the flight is thinking.

You know what’s going to happen after we finish first? We will be moving up next season. To the highest flight in the league. Where there are former college players and 5.0s running amok. Laughing. Smirking. Drop-shotting.

We did not think this one through.

I’m convinced opposing teams purposefully gave points away so they wouldn’t finish first. It looked pretty dicey there in the middle part of the season when all the teams were bunched up, but a few weeks of the other captains “selflessly” letting everyone play and coincidentally making those players drive an hour across major highways to play the team I’m on and whaddaya know. Those opposing teams are safely not in first place now.

We are. Sigh.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the best part about being the captain of a 4.5 USTA team: after playing a non-USTA team tennis league match against strangers who were well on their way to steamrolling my behind before my partner stepped in, placed me on her back while I’m kicking and screaming, and dragged both of us across the finish line to victory, I will, of course, ask those opponents, “Would you be interested in playing on my USTA team?”

Their response: “I’m a 4.5…um…is this a 4.5 team?”

That’s fun. Tennis is fun. Everyone should experience how much fun tennis is.

Speaking of which, I am actually captaining a 4.0 USTA team in addition to the 4.5 one this summer.

*Music screeches to a halt*

What?

No. No, I can’t play on the team. I mean, not this summer, anyway. When mid-year ratings come out though, I should be…

Yes, that’s right. I’m just captaining a tennis team…that I can’t play on.

What? Is that, like, not a usual thing people do or something? Huh. Oh! So sorry for my rudeness. We haven’t been properly introduced, yet…

Hi, I’m Christy!

Read the rest of this entry »

My USTA Tri-Level tennis team finished 2^nd in the area tournament last weekend. It’s the single greatest thing in the universe that has ever happened to me*. I think I’m supposed to add “tennis-wise” to the end of that sentence. Oh, well.

*Happened to me – as in lucking out with having awesome players who played and won while I sat in my cozy chair and sipped on grapes.

On Tuesday, the powers that be emailed out to everyone a congratulatory note that listed all the winners and runner-ups. I was stoked. The names of all the fearsome Grand Wizards in my area decorated that document. And then there was my name right alongside those luminaries. I couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear when I saw it.

I got all ready to print the email out so I could put it on a plaque and hang it in my Weekend Tennis shrine when I spotted it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tri-Level is this weekend for my area. Tri-Level is a USTA team tennis tournament in which three lines of three different rated doubles teams (for example: 4.5/4.0/3.5 or 4.0-3.5-3.0) play each head-to-head match. Win at least two of those lines, and your team has won that match-up and on your merry way you go to the next one.

The idea behind the tournament, I believe, is to allow tennis friends across rating levels to be on the same USTA team for once and to compete together in this fun-with-racquets game we lovingly call tennis.

That’s the technical definition.

Here’s the underlying definition. Tri-Level is a team tennis tournament in which captains craft their rosters by grabbing and hoarding the bestest players of each rating level they can find. The recruiting call/text/email could be the first time the captains and the differently rated players have ever had correspondence.

Tri-Level uses the year-end ratings from the previous year, and the tournament itself generally occurs late the next calendar year. Boy does a lot happen in a year. So for this weekend’s tournament in November of 2013, what the computer said you were rated at the end of 2012 is the minimum* level you can play at.

*Players can always play up, but having people play up at Tri-Level would be…unconventional, as you’ll see, and goes against the unwritten spirit of the tournament.

Unwritten, that is, until now. 🙂

Read the rest of this entry »

• 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”?

Read the rest of this entry »

I feel like a million things have happened since last I wrote that have rocked my personal tennis world, and at some point when my head has cleared, I hope to address the two major ones. But if I never do, which is more likely, here’s where my head is at with those things:

The Qualifying Tournament: If I weren’t me, I would concentrate on what was probably the best part of the QT, or what I like to call, the worst thing that happened to my 4.0 team: my teammates mercilessly razzing me for eating chilli cheese fries as my pre-game meal and blaming that for why I cramped up/lost in the deciding match that pretty much dashed the hopes and dreams of my team for the tournament. If I weren’t me, I would focus on how much I laughed and laughed during that team bonding experience and how much I enjoyed the team camaraderie while we were rallying and figuring out how to win all five lines of our last flight match in order to advance (which we didn’t do). Alas, it’s me so…

Early Season League Ratings: In my USTA section, mid-year ratings come out around this time. USTA ratings are a BIG deal in my town. It’s just…it’s just stupid how big a deal it is. Teams disband; relationships are severed; and people cry because of this one silly pdf file.

There are 3 main reactions when ratings come out: 1. “Darn right.” 2. “Crap.” 3. “EXCUSE ME? How did the powers that be not recognize my greatness??” Remind me that I want to break down these thoughts and all the different variations just in time for when the year-end ratings come out. This year’s year-end list in particular is going to be a lot of fun…

…because I got bumped up when mid-season ratings came out. I’m sure I’ll unleash my hot sports opinions on this sudden bit of news at some point, but that is not this post (here’s a tease for you: I didn’t go undefeated and I barely won several of my matches this season. They clearly were meeting a quota by bumping me up). This post is about what happened afterwards and how I’ve inadvertently found myself in the cross hairs of one of the grand wizards of my tennis community.

Read the rest of this entry »

You are never going to believe this…

So remember when I laughed and laughed at the end of the last post like I had everything figured out and I said I was going to captain again? Remember that? Remember how haughtily and cavalier I was about captaining like it wasn’t the most stressful, frustrating, and aggravating thing I’ve taken on since I gave up party planning for my tennis teams?

Remember how I gave up party planning for my tennis teams because it was so stressful, frustrating, and aggravating?

Well, the tennis gods read my last post – they’re totally subscribers – and they said to themselves, “We’re going to jog that silly person’s memory about how much fun captaining really is. Let’s challenge this whole ‘next time’ big talk of hers.”

Because guess what? My USTA Thursday team is going to the Qualifying Tournament after all.

Unbelievable.

Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe my tennis team lost the last match of the season so that I would post regularly again.

Joke’s on them, of course. It’s taken me nearly two weeks to get over that loss. HAH!

I’m still not over it. I’m still in Phase One of the Don’t Make Play-Offs By One Match Recovery Stage: moping around in my sweat pants. Who’s joining me for Phase Two?

Read the rest of this entry »

Captaining is going well. Thanks for asking. I’m learning a lot. Every week, every day, every match, and every player is a learning experience.

I hate learning.

Read the rest of this entry »

Somebody made this delightful video that summarizes everything I’ve ever thought about women’s recreational tennis in two and a half minutes.

Because of this video, there’s really no reason for me to keep writing. Oh, well.

The last time I was this stressed co-captaining a tennis team, that team ended up winning Sectionals. I guess that’s something to try to remember as I’m being pelted by the tennis gods as they play their version of dodgeball with me. In this game, I don’t get eliminated once I’ve been hit; I just keep getting hit. It hurts.

It is the second/third week of USTA, and I’ve discovered a truth about the player/captain relationship that I’m sure veteran captains already know: I dread hearing from any of my players. I don’t want to see a text from any of them on my cell; I don’t want to see an incoming call from any of them on my phone; and I don’t want to see an email from any of them in my inbox. In a perfect world, I would simply send out the line-up to the team, crawl back into bed, and sleep out the week till I had to see the scheduled players on Match Day.

I better see them all accounted for on Match Day. On time. Ooh, maybe even early. Wait. No. We’re still just working on being on time. Baby steps.

Read the rest of this entry »