An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
One of the recommendations from the classic tennis book “The Inner Game of Tennis,” is is for the player to imagine that they are observing their own match from an external perspective. It is a valuable technique for alleviating tension and stress while a match is in progress. It is also a valuable perspective to take for understanding what is happening strategically and tactically during the course of a match.
There is a new digital platform forthcoming for USTA tennis engagement. This was announced as one of the strategic priorities of the USTA ongoing restructuring initiative. There is also evidence of the forthcoming underlying infrastructure on the USTA web page. At least part of the new initiative will be known as Serve Tennis.
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Yesterday I wrote about the results of an internet search for “learn to play tennis.” I intentionally did not mention the first paid advertisement that came up as a result of that query. The ad I was served was for the PlayYourCourt tennis community. This is a perfect segue to return to the topic of TennisLink.
When I played junior tennis there were two ways to enter a tennis tournament. One was to visit the host facility of the event to register and pay the entry fee. The other was to fill out a physical entry form and mail it into the host organization with a check. This is the point in the story where the umpire I gave birth to usually interjects to ask about the stone tablet postage rates for those entry forms.
Shortly after last week’s “Hawk-Eye Live” post was issued, I realized that I failed to mention my favorite feature of the system. Hawk-Eye Live includes a multitude of voices that annunciate the actual line calls. The system includes male, female, and multiple accents. The diversity delights me.
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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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.
As I was watching “Schroders Battle of the Brits” a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that Andy Murray was wearing what I assumed to be a back brace during one of his early matches. I was trying to figure out the exact nature of his new apparent ailment before I noticed that all the other players were also wearing the same device.