This weekend is all about the curious and bizarre ritual of the cooperative tennis warmup. This topic finally rose to the top of my queue following the recent drama between Jelena Ostapenko and Taylor Townsend at the US Open. Most of the headlines focused on the handshake that turned ugly, with Ostapenko insinuating that Townsend had “no class and no education.” However, tucked inside that storm was a more subtle subplot. Specifically, Ostapenko complained about the way Townsend warmed up.
In an Instagram statement made during the fallout from all the rest of the drama, Ostapenko called out the fact that Townsend began the pre-match warmup at the net rather than from the baseline. That is a departure from the standard choreography of the cooperative warmup. It’s the kind of unwritten-rule nuance of tennis culture that I live for.
In preparation for this post, I attempted to rewatch the beginning of that fateful match on demand. Unfortunately, ESPN chose to cover most of the warmup with a “Commercial Break” splash screen and a graphic of the draw instead of the players hitting balls back and forth. However, the fact that Townsend pivoted and headed straight to the net after collecting the balls post-toss was evident. Other WTA players have noted that starting the warmup at the net is her personal routine dating back to her junior playing days. I feel like that is something that should be in every one of her opponents’ scouting reports.
Later, Ostapenko decided the way Townsend warmed up was an egregious breach of etiquette. However, it seems telling that Ostapenko didn’t appear especially irritated at the time when the warmup concluded. For example, the chair umpire mistakenly sent the balls to her end of the court after she won the toss and elected to receive, she corrected the error calmly and without fuss. At the end of the warmup, Ostapenko looked composed and ready.
Apparently, the irritation only really surfaced after the loss, and it was folded into the much larger controversy of the handshake and its aftermath. In hindsight, the warmup became part of Ostapenko’s catalog of grievances, one more layer of disrespect she pinned on Townsend. I suspect that she wouldn’t have mentioned it at all had she won the match.
The cooperative warm-up is one of tennis’s most unusual and unspoken social contracts. The players who are about to battle work together for just a few minutes to find their rhythm. There’s no official rule dictating how it must be done, nor does it appear in The Code. Instead, these are expectations hard-wired into the culture of the sport.
So while the world remembers this match for the fireworks at the net, I’m focused on something smaller. The fragile ballet of the warmup is an often-overlooked aspect of competitive tennis. This weekend, we will deep dive into that topic, starting out with my own very bitter warm-up moment tomorrow.
