Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

Last Friday morning, I drove into work while big flakes of snow were swirling down and powdering up the roads. I took the tollway with the logic that not having to brake and stop and turn on the treacherous pathways would be the best strategy for a safe drive. Not to mention it’d be the fastest route into the office.

I was wrong. Traffic slowed to a crawl as a two-car accident was being attended to by the cops on the left-most lane. As soon as I passed the wreckage, I vroomed back over to the passing lane. Other than the roads being wet, the snow didn’t appear to have much of an effect on the traveling conditions for this particular stretch of the tollway, and I figured it’d be an easy cruise the rest of the way into work with perhaps merely moments of the-car-is-slipping anxiousness that would ultimately prove innocuous…which I experienced earlier that week on my drive home from the office when it had sleeted and the roads were icy.

Suddenly, the white mini-SUV-jeep-looking vehicle in the right-most lane 30 yards in front of me lost control, turned 90 degrees to the left, drove straight into the rail, spun in place, and stopped in the middle of the left lane. That I was on.

Because I had just left the scene of a car accident and perhaps because of how fast I had been going, I had time to slow down and check behind me, veer into the middle lane without incident, and continue safely past the vehicle with its severely damaged front-end and its no-doubt traumatized passengers inside. And then I exited the tollway.

So that was my Friday, February 27th. How was yours?

The weather has been quite the hot topic of interest for the recreational tennis players of the Dallas/Ft. Worth area recently. Last week was the first week for several of the local community tennis leagues. Mother Nature could not have cared less. Or maybe she did care and she was purposefully screwing with everyone. However you want to look at it.

The real flurry of fun was the heated discussion of having to play during these conditions. Thursday, Feb. 26 was the first day for the weekday ladies section of the Tennis Competitors of Dallas (TCD) league, and it was the only day of the week when precipitation wasn’t in the forecast.

But it would be cold. Like in-the-30s-but-it-feels-like-it’s-in-the-20s cold. With 20 mph winds.

TCD doesn’t have a rule on not playing because of non-precipitous weather (cold, wind, heat). Like that’s the actual rule:

Page 35, under Section K. Weather Conditions, under item 2: “There are no provisions for extreme cold, heat, or wind.”

Which means you’re supposed to play.

Wouldn’t you know it, but this did not sit well with the grown women who can play recreational adult tennis on a weekday morning.

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 »

To kick off one of my non-USTA metropolitan leagues (TCD), here’s a post dedicated to that thing near and dear to the heart of so many of its players and teams: Team Uniforms.

This was supposed to be a real post with full paragraphs and a beginning, middle, and end. And then I started writing.

• Do you know how the big athletic apparel corporations come up with each season’s new outfits? They have a bet on which combination of clashing colors will sell the most.

“These two colors are so mismatched that the public will definitely be onto us this time.”

“Nah. If you put our logo on it and feature it in a glossy magazine, they will buy it.”

“Heeheehee.”

Read the rest of this entry »