An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
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.
Our exploration of the hindrance rule in the ITF Rules of Tennis continues. Today the focus shifts from hindrance that is within a player’s personal control to things that a player cannot control.
We have spend the past two days covering the first paragraph of the “Hindrance” section of the ITF Rules of Tennis as published by the USTA Friend at Court. Today we will move into the second paragraph of the rule which discussed unintentional acts and things outside the player’s own control.
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Today I will continue to dwell on additional audible examples of hindering an opponent. The first is a clip between Maria Sharapova and Maria Kirilenko. I chose this example because it a good example of a non-verbal sound.
“Hindrance” is the next section of the ITF Rules of Tennis as published in the USTA Friend at Court. We have also reached the point where discussing and analyzing the rules becomes decidedly more salacious.
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Unless the umpire who gave birth to me rats me out to the umpire I gave birth to, I am probably going to skate by without a lot of blow back from being wrong on this one. The umpire I gave birth to does not regularly read this blog.
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So many times in this project I have made a plan on how to cover material, only to veer off onto a rabbit trail or discover that I don’t have as much to write about a given topic as I anticipate. With that backdrop, let me outline my intended content over the next three days.
The next two subsections of “A Good Return” deal with unusual situations involving the net post. I have never personally encountered either of these situations in a live match.
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