Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

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.

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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. 🙂

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Tennis is hard.

Tennis is so flippity hard.

Nearly every time I play tennis, I’m rudely awoken by a shot I’ve never seen before. Wait, that exists? You can do that with the ball? I’m still trying to learn how to hit a groundstroke that’ll go over the net and into the court. Hopefully, deep. That’s where I’m at. That’s where I’ve been at for the last few years. And now you’re telling me you can hit the ball like that and it’ll land like this and then…spin in a circle and shoot straight up into the air never to be seen again??

Mind. Blown.

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House Sitting Adventures: The dogs are pawing at the space in between the floor and the cabinet. There’s something stuck underneath. I get down and lie on the floor to see what all the fuss is about and pull out an Angry Birds chew toy. Still on my belly, I throw the toy over yonder to oblige the anxious, panting dogs and then immediately realize my fatal mistake: “You’re about to be stampeded and trampled on like Mufasa was by the antelopes in The Lion King!”

Thankfully, the thundering 25 lb cocker spaniels have the good sense to run around me in their mad chase to the toy, and by the time I’ve recovered from seeing my life flash before my eyes and have righted myself, the six dogs are once more beside me, tails wagging, toy dropped, ready for me to throw Angry Bird again.

I think a lot about why people play tennis. Because I often don’t understand why I play tennis. Why do people think tennis is fun when it brings so much…frustration? Is it the complaining? Is that the part that’s fun? That’s gotta be it. With how much complaining that goes on in weekend tennis, that makes the most sense. The actual tennis itself is secondary.

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House sitting adventures: I’m house sitting cats. These cats are free to come and go as they please as they have a pet door in the back of the house. Usually, however, these cats will wait for me to hold the door open for them before coming in. Well, no, I take that back. They’ll wait for me to hold the door open for them; I’ll oblige; and then they’ll stop a foot from the door and survey me uncertainly. Now I have to coax them to come in and try to convince them that I’m not scary (it’s my first time pet sitting for these cats so we’re just getting used to each other). I’ll spend a minute just standing there, holding the door open as still as I can because any creak will scare them away, and talk to the cats as if I were a part of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit. After the cats have either scurried inside or scampered away, I’ll look up, and of course, there’s a neighbor watching me. I leave her so she can laugh openly at this display of human-animal deference also known as the crazy lady talking to cats.

I met with a house/pet sitting client the other day, and as is the case with most of my clients, the wife plays tennis and the husband does not. He could not stop poking fun at the irrational tennis culture his wife and I are a part of.

“What is with you tennis players and your addiction to the game? An orthopedic friend was telling me how a guy with a broken leg was trying to figure out how to keep playing tennis. I mean, you’re not going to keep playing tennis; you have a broken leg!”

Let me try to explain the sickness.

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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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Recreational tennis is heralded as one of those sports adults should play: it’s life-long fun; it’s good for the physical health; and it brings together strangers who, at best, may end up being friends for life, and, at the very least, may enrich each other’s lives.

We know better.

There is something wrong with my knee now. There was nothing wrong with my knee until last week when I played scrabble tennis. As I was scrambling madly around during a point in a doubles practice match, I inadvertently banged my racquet on the side of my knee, and I felt…something. I never would have played in said match except one of my “friends” said, “I am free for tennis on such-and-such morning within this particular time frame” and then looked at me expectantly. “Um, o-okay, I-I’ll set something up then!” Because that’s what I do. As a sucker friend.

All of the women I played with in that fateful practice match – this will be the match I look back at when I have to have knee surgery – are all “friends.” You know what they said when I was trying to walk out the wobbliness in my knee?

<sarcastically>“Uh-huh, sure looks serious.”</>

“She’s faking it.”

“Come on, Vutam.”

To their credit, they did offer to stop the match prematurely…as they were taking their respective places for the next point.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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