An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
During the “double bubble” tournaments of the recently completed Western and Southern Open and US Open, I could not help but to notice the number of male players who were frequently lounging about their player suite area without shirts.
This is the final installment examining a question that was surfaced in the Facebook group for USTA tournament players in Texas. A rule was proposed to the Capital Area Tennis Association (CATA) in Austin that would restrict players from captaining multiple teams within the same league.
In “Life on the Border: Tennis in DFW” I wrote about a practice colloquially known as “double dipping” in league tennis. It is fairly common in the DFW area for players to play league tennis in both Dallas and Fort Worth. Additionally, most local leagues allow players to play on more than one team within a league, as long as those teams are in separate flights or divisions.
A couple of weeks ago a player posted a question to the Facebook group of the active USTA tennis tournament players in Texas. The fundamental question is whether it is fair for a single person to captain multiple teams within the same league that play in the same flight. The hallmark of this site is using these types of situations to dissect and analyze the individual and organizational dynamics involved. This is a terrific case study to examine the rules and incentives in the USTA League framework.
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One of the immutable differences between pickleball and tennis is the size of the court. Four pickleball courts can be constructed in the same space as would generally be allocated to one tennis court. In fact, the “four pack” arrangement of pickleball courts into the same size area as a tennis court is a very good configuration for considering the social dynamics of pickleball.
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Examination of pickleball is unavoidable and inevitable in any serious consideration in growing the game of tennis. Pickleball is regarded as a competitive threat to tennis. At the same time, the explosive growth of the sport is an enticing case study for any sport wishing to replicate the same success.
As far as I can tell, pickleball players do not have jobs. They do not have families. They consume all their meals from ice coolers which they carry up to the courts with them on a regular basis. They never leave.
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Since I first wrote “Innovate or Die: USTA Adult Tournament Structure in 2021,” pretty much every “Fiend at Court Unplugged” post has examined some aspect of the upcoming changes. Until the USTA publishes something new on this topic, or we start to see events scheduled under the new structure, it is time to move on. Before I do that, I want to create a single page that chronicles what has been written up to this point in time.
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Someday I will tell the story of when I quit tennis forever. Today I want to focus on a tiny part of the story of when I came back to tennis. Specifically, how I slid down the slippery slope into the NTRP system. As previously mentioned in “My Days as an NTRP Sandbagging Bastard” I never had any desire to play NTRP rated tennis.
I keep returning to the point that Anthony Tatu raised recently in the Facebook group of avid Texas Tennis Tournament Players. His assertion was that leagues now have so many formats and variations that players no longer have “free” time to participate in tournaments. It is a valid point. For adults who already play tennis, USTA leagues are the most significant consumer market competition of USTA tournaments.