An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
The “Cone Game” is one of my favorite tennis practice drills. It is a great development tool because it gets the players into an Zen-like focus that is still layered with the pressure of competition. I recently used the SwingVision during a practice session that included the Cone Game and was very happy with the results. I continue to be completely enamored with the SwingVision application and service.
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A great article by Jon Wertheim on how the WTA has responded to the Peng Shuai situation is the lead story from the weekly roundup. A collection of eclectic stories round out the week.
USTA is a massive non-profit organization with a certain number of full time paid staff. However, most of the the work is largely performed by a cadre of volunteers grouped into numerous committees. Yesterday I wrote about differences between the Adult and Junior tennis tournament Regulations and Ranking procedures. The origins for that divergence can be traced directly to the USTA organization structure for the committees that own those documents.
There are striking differences between USTA Adult and Junior tournament regulations. The same can be said about the respective ranking systems. Over the past couple of months, I have written a lot about errors and inconsistencies in the USTA Adult regulations and ranking system. In the background, I frequently reference the equivalent documentation that governs Junior competition for additional insight and perspective. The fact that the Adult and Junior documents are vastly different is immediately apparent even on casual review. The fundamental question is this: Should those differences exist?
Last Sunday I described a request I made to the USTA Adult Competition Committee to update the glossary in the USTA Adult and Family Tournament, Ranking, and Sanctioning Regulations. Today I want to step through the process for how that actually occurs. To keep this topic from being as boring as it… Well, actually is… I am going to unapologetically leverage the linguistic style of the Schoolhouse Rock classic, “I’m just a Bill.”
I don’t think it is unreasonable to stake the claim that the Fiend at Court has independently reviewed more tennis books over the last two years than any other site. That being said, there were quite a few notable titles first published this year that I never got around to reading. (So many books, so little time.) Today I am sharing books from 2021 that are in personal reading queue that I plan to get around to covering… eventually.
The ATP recently unveiled plans to modify medical timeouts for tour events. Since the announcement came in the same press release as the new bathroom break rules, it kind of got lost in the shuffle. Additionally, the ATP has not determined exactly when this new rule will be effective. The expectation is that it will come sometime in 2022.
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I am still completely enamored with the SwingVision application. I have always been a big proponent of video review, but until SwingVision came into my life, my primary usage was pretty much confined to examination of individual stroke mechanics. My recent session using SwingVision with a ball machine illustrates how the heat map generated by the application opens a much wider perspective.
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USTA CEO Michael Dowse abruptly resigns, the ITF confirms that there are no World Tour events in China in 2022, and tennis great Darlene Hard passes away.
Yesterday I described an ambiguity in the USTA Adult and Family Tournament, Ranking & Sanctioning Regulations document that impacts how ranking points are awarded at tournaments. This has prompted me to explore the process for proposing updates to that document. The specific change will be a clarification of how rankings points are assigned for players/teams that do not win a match in Round Robin pool play. Like any good bureaucracy, the USTA has a process for updating their regulations.
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