An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
I am continuing to encounter horror after horror in the “Correcting Errors” section of the ITF Rules of Tennis as published in the USTA Friend at Court. My only consolation is that after today there are only four additional subsections of this rule to cover. This section will all be over by Labor Day.
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If a player serves out of turn during a tie-break game and the error is discovered after an even number of points have been played, the error is corrected immediately. If the error is discovered after an odd number of points have been played, the order of service shall remain as altered.
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.
During a standard game or a tie-break game, if the players are at the wrong ends of the court, the error should be corrected as soon as it is discovered and the server shall serve from the correct end of the court according to the score.
It seems weird to be writing about the rules of tennis after my extended tangent. Trying to remember that I had just wrapped up the “Hindrance” section was somewhat disorienting. Even the act of pasting the USTA Friend at Court reference into the footer of this post caused a new sensation. I wonder where the 2021 USTA publishing location will be, since the closure of the White Plains office was announced in the interim.
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To tie a bow on the Hindrance Section in the ITF Rules of Tennis, I want to share a video that the ITF published on Hindrance. I don’t know exactly when the video was made, but Tennis Australia posted it on YouTube in 2010.
Today we will dispense with the final Case Decision in the Hindrance section of the ITF Rules of Tennis. It is also an excellent case study for discussion on how seemingly arbitrary the hindrance rule can be at times.
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In “Ball Strikes Ball” I confessed that I may have made a rules based error when chastising the umpire I gave birth to for not clearing stray tennis balls off her court during her matches. Specifically, I mentioned that I carried a dog eared copy of the “ITF Rules of Tennis” in my bag as supporting evidence for my assertion that leaving balls on the court would result in a loss of the point.
As I have progressed through this project I have encountered rules and ITF Case Decisions that seem pretty straight forward at first glance. Sometimes as I start exploring such rules, complexity emerges that was not immediately apparent to me. Today’s ITF Case Decision is one of those instances.
The Hindrance section of the ITF Rules of Tennis as published in the USTA Friend at Court contains 5 Case Decisions. Today we are covering the first two that are just a tad bit inane. When a Case Decision exists, I take it to mean that it a response question or scenario that is escalated to the ITF on a recurring basis. The inclusion of the first two case decision may have arisen from sheer exasperation.