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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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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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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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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