Fiend at Court Unplugged
As I wrote about yesterday in “Surveying Borders USTA Texas Style,” players who live in the DFW area have a lot of opportunities to play tennis by virtue of being classified as local within both the Dallas and the Fort Worth playing areas. To emphasize this point, today’s post enumerates those opportunities. It is truly an embarrassment of riches.
On the surface, it is probably pretty obvious at this point that most players can elect to play on teams in both Dallas and Fort Worth. I suspect that most people might do the math on this one and come up with the idea that this represents an opportunity to play on two teams. It is actually a lot more than than.
Two excerpts from the Greater Fort Worth Tennis Coalition (GFWTC) and the Dallas Tennis Association (DTA) USTA league regulations are provided to illustrate this point.
Players can play on multiple teams at the same level as long as they are on different days.
GFWTC League Regulation 5A.
A player may play on more than one team within a division at the same NTRP level provided it is in separate local leagues.
DTA League Regulation 4C.
It is pretty standard for DTA and GWFTC to run separate leagues that play on different days of the week. For example, I once simultaneously played on DTA teams on Thursday and Sunday and GFWTC teams on Friday and Saturday. Once. It was a little too much, even by my standards. Now might be a good time to remind everyone that I still work full time.
But wait – there’s more! There are 16 Community Tennis Associations (CTAs) registered with the USTA within a 50 mile radius of my centrally located address in the DFW. Among those are two that run rather large non-USTA sanctioned leagues that are also completely outside of the NTRP system. These two CTAs are Tennis Competitors of Dallas (TCD) and the Metroplex Tennis Association (Metro). I currently play on TCD and Metro teams.
Many of the other CTAs in the area also run local leagues or similar adult programming. I have not historically participated in those opportunities, but they are out there. I think that is more than enough to make the point about the embarrassment of riches in terms of opportunities to play.
Yesterday I described this environment as an eco-system. The selection of that word was intentional. There are a lot of players in this area because there are a lot of organizations providing opportunities to play. Conversely, there are a lot of organizations in the area who provide opportunities to play because there are a lot of players.
As USTA National works through the ongoing effort that re-imagines the structure of the organization to get closer to players at the local level, the DFW area should absolutely be considered as a place to study, test, and evaluate various initiatives to encourage and foster play at the local level.
Through the broader tennis community at the USTA Sectional and National level, I am aware that there is a certain degree of jealously if not outright resentment that players have more than one opportunity to advance to Sectionals locally . I have been told that on more than one occasion that it is “not fair” that there is more opportunity for league play in DFW than in other parts of the Texas Section.
I understand that perspective. Tennis should not be a privilege that is exclusive to people who live in densely populated urban and suburban areas. At the same time, the solution should not be to lower the bar of opportunities in an attempt to make things equitable. In the spirit of “encourage and foster” the focus needs to be on growing the game elsewhere.
Tomorrow we are going to look at tennis in a completely different environment. We are taking a little trip into the tennis wastelands of Texas. It is a scary, scary place.
- 2020 GFWTC League Regulations: A handbook for captains and players, viewed July 18, 2020.
- USTA Dallas Local League Rules & Regulations, USTA Championship Year 2020, viewed July 18, 2020.
- Tennis Competitors of Dallas, tcdtenis.com, viewed July 18, 2020.
- Metroplex Tennis League, metroplextennis.org, viewed July 18, 2020.
