Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

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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