An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
The only reason that I was aware that Hawk-Eye Live was in use for this year’s WTT event is because it has failed to make a call on a couple of occasions. Those errors of omission were quickly overruled by the chair umpire. It made me wonder about the error rate of the Hawk-Eye system and how it works exactly.
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One sure sign that tennis is gearing up for the resumption of play following the COVID-19 hiatus is the bow wave of requests to sign waivers currently populating my email inbox. Waivers will clearly be required to participate in organized tennis going forward and in some cases to use facilities at all. Not surprisingly, this new wave of waivers includes updated language addressing transmission of communicable disease while playing tennis. It makes me nostalgic for the days when tearing an ACL or other physical injury was the primary concern.
I am not originally from the DFW area. I was born and raised in Wichita Falls, Texas. Every once in a while, as I contemplate my options as I near retirement from my day job, the idea pops into my head to consider moving back to my childhood hometown. The complete absence of organized adult competitive tennis always quickly dispatches that option. I simply cannot live in a tennis wasteland.
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As I wrote about yesterday in “Surveying Borders USTA Texas Style,” players who live in the DFW area have a lot of opportunities to play tennis by virtue of being classified as local within both the Dallas and the Fort Worth playing areas. To emphasize this point, today’s post enumerates those opportunities. It is truly an embarrassment of riches.
In “Geography Lessons from USTA Texas,” we learned the secret locations of the center of each of the five large cities in Texas as officially designated by USTA Texas Section office. This makes it possible to draw those circles on a map with a high degree of precision. As a player in the DFW area, I have always been very curious about what that map actually looks like.
The Inner Game of Tennis is the only book I will make the following statement about. You can say that you are serious about improving your game, but if you have not bothered to read this book, you’re kidding yourself.
As previously discussed in “Rules of Tennis: Order of Service,” I have a near religious reverence for the Order of Service. In fact, I am appalled to see that it is not capitalized within the Correcting Errors section. Anything that impinges on the sanctity of the Order of Service makes me a little edgy.
In my junior development days, there were basically only two drills that the coaches used for conditioning. The first was to line the kids up on the outside of one of the doubles alleys and have us “run lines” which is essentially just a series of short sprints. The second was running some number of specified laps around the tennis center, or later when I was playing scholastic tennis the adjacent track around the football practice field.
A local tennis center in my area, Hurst Tennis Center, was delayed in reopening after the COVID-19 shutdown. I have subsequently learned that part of the reason for this is because the municipality was considering shutting down the facility and using the land to expand the adjacent water park. As it turns out, the tennis center is a cost rather than a profit center for the city.
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As the USTA works through the ongoing effort that re-imagines the structure of the organization to get closer to players at the local level, I think that the concept of “encourage and foster” has to be one of the primary guiding principles.