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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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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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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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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The bump up from 3.5 to 4.0* seems to always come with the same general response: “IT’S ABOUT DANG TIME. Stupid computer. Like, of course, I’m not a 3.5. Gah, the embarrassment I’ve had to endure…”

The bump up from 4.0 to 4.5* also seems to always come with its own general response: “The USTA rating system is a joke! There goes a year of my life. I’m going to get killed. I am NOT a 4.5. You’re kidding, right? Well, there went winning…”

*I’m using specific ratings a) because it’s true and b) to make the post easier to follow, but of course, these feelings of joy or dread can be applied at any level. We all know people who were convinced being bumped up to 4.0 was the end of their tennis world as they knew it. And then quit tennis. Sigh.

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Here is a list of tennis etiquette rules every person who picks up the ole tennis racquet should know when it comes to playing tennis.

Some of these are actual but commonly violated rules that can be found in either the International Tennis Federation (ITF) Rules of Tennis and/or The Code. Together, those two handbooks govern most tennis leagues and tournaments.

Some of these are not stated in either of those doctrines but are the unwritten, common courtesy guidelines that are often breached by inexperienced players.

You all are most welcome!

In no particular order:

• Practice matches are two hours long at a minimum. That’s how long it takes to play a worthwhile for-fun match. If you don’t have two hours to play tennis, let the organizer know you’ll only be able to play for an hour and a half and see if she’s cool with that. And if you can’t play for at least an hour and a half, you can’t play at all.

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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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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.

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I’ve decided to start playing tennis tournaments this year. A coach said playing more meaningful matches would help make me a better player and I pretty much do what coaches tell me to do if it means I get better.

Well that and I finally feel comfortable enough with my tennis game where I’m pretty sure I won’t be blown out by most opponents in the first round and it’ll actually be worth it to pay the exorbitant entry fees (for me that would be any dollar amount over $5) that sometimes only guarantees me one match in an event.

For those not in the know, a tennis tournament typically offers multiple events players can enter into (singles, doubles, mixed doubles, etc.), and each event requires its own entry fee.

In the first tournament I played in to kick start this tournament journey, it proudly said on the website “You spoke, we listened” (the bold is all them) and that it was changing its consolation rules. No more consolation for any doubles events because a survey was sent out and “62% were in favor of eliminating consolation brackets in doubles in order to allow a player to register for two doubles events.”

I feel like those 62% don’t understand basic math…but the people running the tournament sure do!

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• One of my high school teachers said that to purposefully get every question wrong on a multiple choice exam was harder than it seemed. If anyone pulled off the feat, he would give that student a 100. This challenge created a bit of a buzz in the classroom, but of course, no one took him up on it.

For whatever reason, that memory surfaced recently, and now I’m tempted to see if I can manipulate my line-ups so that my oblivious team will lose every line, every match.

Obviously, the first step in losing every line, every match would be to not play me, um… 😉

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