Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

When I play doubles, there are times when it feels like I’m the scrawny, nobody-character in the TV show/movie who the screen shows the big bad guys being fearful of and sprinting away from, and my character’s all like “Yeah, that’s right! BE SCARED OF ME!”

Then I turn around and come face-to-face with the hero of the story with all the muscle and actual butt-kicking ability who was standing behind me the whole time.

Oh. So that’s why I won.

It’s especially fun when the match concludes and I go up to the net to shake hands with the opponents and they practically push me aside to flirt with my doubles partner and gush over her tennis abilities.

I don’t even recognize the win afterwards because I was as useful as a fern while my doubles partner, who is above my pay grade, did all the dominatin’ and I feel all worthless inside and I tear up on my drive home LIKE WHAT IS EVEN THE POINT ANYMORE.

Ahem.

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I hit tennis rock bottom the other day.

I brought it upon myself, of course. You see, dear reader, I am a tennis hypochondriac. I am constantly tinkering around with my strokes and am always in the process of learning a brand new stinkin’ technique because of my perpetual need to get better at tennis. Three months ago it was my serve. Currently, it’s my forehand groundstroke. In a few months, it’ll be my backhand groundstroke.

My volleys are a never-ending technique nightmare that I have yet to wake up from. And my overhead is a lost cause…so I will try to take every ball that remotely resembles an overhead instead of letting my doubles partner hit the surefire basic groundstroke because I believe that’s how I’ll overcome my overhead issue.

And after all the work that’s been put into my serve thus far, I still double fault at an alarming rate.

Sigh.

Just another lovely reason why you don’t want to be partnered up with me. You should let our captain know if you haven’t already.

Unless I’m our captain, um…

Tangent thought #1: Hey, have you ever wondered how many people on your tennis team have asked your captain to not be paired up with you?

Tangent thought #2: Good grief, you know what would be an excellent way to make sure you got partnered up with the one player on the team you want to play with? No, not tell the captain. Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t do that. Don’t be that player.

NO, what you should do is to piss off everyone else you’re paired up with till there’s only ONE person left on the team the captain can put you with. GENIUS.

You. You out there. You know who you are. And you are a genius. My hats off to you, madam.

So, anyway, I’m in the process of overhauling my forehand groundstroke, and…

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The USTA Combo Tournament was underway this weekend for my area (and will take place next weekend for the area an hour from here – Hi, Fort Worth!). I didn’t play in it, which confirms my suspicions that if I didn’t captain a USTA team, I would never get to play USTA tennis.

I’m playin’ with ya. I’m honestly relieved that my reputation for captaining teams and needing to micromanage precedes me and people automatically assume I’m putting together a team and don’t ask me to play on theirs. Yes, that’s it, Christy. Keep telling yourself that. 😉

I have never quite understood the Combo Tournament.

Someone sadistically thought it would be an excellent idea to pair up two people of different ratings to play another pairing of the same different ratings. Three lines for each team match and voilà. The Combo Tournament!

Obviously, this someone was the lower rated player in his/her Combo doubles partnership.

I have been on teams in which I was not good enough to play with certain teammates, but of course, the only person who didn’t know I wasn’t good enough was me. If I had known at the time that I could have just shrewdly entered into this tournament to pair up with these too-good-to-partner-up-with-under-normal-circumstances players, I would have been ALL over this.

Did I describe the person who thought of this concept as sadistic? There’s a part of me that would like to change the term to genius. Total genius.

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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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I stumbled upon this D Magazine feature article on TCD (a non-USTA, cities-spanning, flight-ladder league in my area) from 1999. Some of the words/letters didn’t quite make it in the digital transition, but otherwise…yup. Yup, yup. Exactly.

On to the actual post:

You do not want to be my doubles partner. I wrote within the first month of starting this blog about the things I do / don’t do that annoy my doubles partners. Well, over the course of two years, I have accumulated even more evidence of my special talent for alienating people from wanting to play with me. I am awesome.

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My doubles partner is trying to tell me about one of the opponents we’re about to play. Like how just crazy, ridiculously awesome she is. I’m listening but I’m texting on my phone – because I’m just such a big deal…and a pompous a– – –  and I’m cockily dismissing everything she’s saying without even looking up. I’m feeling pretty great about tennis right now, and in my current arrogant faze, there is no one I can’t handle.

And then I warm up with the crazy, ridiculously awesome one.

Oh.

My.

Gosh.

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I’m watching the Wildcard Doubles draw for the Challenger of Dallas, a $100,000 prized men’s professional tennis tournament, and something dawns on me about tennis doubles.

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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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My Tri-Level team played Sectionals (where the various winners at the city level throughout the state/USTA section compete against each other) this past weekend. Tri-Level is a team tennis event in which three different rated lines of doubles is played for each team match. My team played in the 3.0/3.5/4.0 Tri-Level league.

My team shouldn’t have even been in the Sectionals tournament, but my city got the wild card entry, and the second place team couldn’t go. It fell to us as the 3^rdplace team (we had a couple of injuries that weekend so getting another chance to prove ourselves would have been amazing). We just had the minimum for the 3.5 and 3.0 lines (two players on each line) to even agree to go to Sectionals in the first place. I’m very thankful those gals were able to get off 401K-compensated work (while the domestic engineers on our team couldn’t get off work…think about it…) to drive 230+ miles and play the two Friday matches as well as playing all the matches over the weekend without incident.

You know who couldn’t get off 401K-compensated work (yes, this will be a thing now) on Friday? Me (which was fine because the team’s best 4.0 doubles team played and had to go three sets in both matches to win. They were down match point each time. Wowza). Instead, my right calf and I carried on conversations all day Friday. I kept asking it if it was going to cramp up on me in my match on Saturday. It kept saying, “Um, maybe.” That’s how my cramps generally start: I can feel my right calf thinking about it.

However, driving four hours right before playing is one way of stopping your right calf from thinking.

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