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High Knee Lifts for Muscle Activation Tennis Beyond the Headlines: November 4, 2024 Who Else is On Your Team? Your Team Needs a Coach Teamwork Makes the Dream Work Revisiting a Scary Tennis Story for Halloween What’s New? The 2025 USTA League Regulations

Surveying USTA League Tennis: Player Edition

A couple of week’s ago, the USTA sent an email last week with a link to a survey directed to all League Players. Last Monday, “Surveying USTA League Tennis: Captain’s Edition” described the questions from the survey that were directed only to players who have captained a team. Today our attention shifts to the survey questions targeted at the entire USTA League playing population.

Fiend at Court Structural Changes Redux

Long time followers of the Fiend at Court will be aware that this site was originally created as an outlet for a daily goal I had established for myself to write a page a day about tennis. At the onset, I was concerned that it might be struggle to come up with enough ideas to fill a page each day. The training wheels phase of this project used a sequential walk through the Rules of Tennis as a daily prompt.

Revisiting an NTRP Horror Story

In 2020, this site published “NTRP Horror Story: When the Carrot becomes a Stick.” That post was my own personal account about abhorrent player behavior in a USTA League match. A the time, I made the assertion that the incentives attached to the NTRP system were a contributing factor in the unsportsmanlike conduct. Today I have a tiny coda to that saga.

The Apples and Oranges of USTA and UTR

A shockingly high number of tennis players can’t articulate the difference between the USTA and Universal Tennis. In fact, Universal Tennis sometimes doesn’t even ring a bell for players. Most tennis players have heard of the the Universal Tennis Rating (UTR) system and use that acronym as a stand in for Universal Tennis. For the sake of simplicity, I sometimes refer to Universal Tennis as UTR. When in Rome.

Days of Grace by Arthur Ashe

After my recent reading of John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, I came to the realization that I needed to brush up on my knowledge of the tennis career of Arthur Ashe. His memoir Days of Grace seemed to be an obvious place to start. Additionally, since February is Black History month, the timing is perfect. As a bonus, a hardcover edition of Days of Grace was already languishing on a shelf in my family room.

USTA Friend at Court 2021

The 2021 edition of the USTA Friend at Court was released a little over a week ago. As was anticipated after examining the 2021 ITF Rules of Tennis earlier this year, there are no substantive rule changes involving match play in this year’s updates. However, there are some significant structural changes that were made to the Friend at Court as well as a slew of new USTA event regulations.

The Topspin Pro Tennis Training Aid

The tennis players that are playing in this year’s Australian Open series recently exited a fourteen day mandatory quarantine period required of everyone who enters Australia. While in isolation, some of the players were allowed to leave the quarantine hotel for a few hours each day under controlled conditions to train and receive treatment. However, many of the players were forced into a “hard” quarantine after others on their chartered flights tested positive for the COVID virus on arrival. Those players were not allowed to leave their rooms at all.