The streak of writing a page a day about tennis has been preserved through three complete months. As the month concludes, per tradition, I will once again indulge myself in a reflection about the exercise. There is nothing about tennis rules here today, so if that is all you are here for, please feel free to move along. Alternatively, this might be a good time to roll back to the very beginning of this project to get a daily tennis rules fix.
This project was started long before the bow-wave of the COVID-19 crisis swept the nation. As I write this morning, I am living under a “shelter-in-place” mandate from my local government. Life is very different than it was a month ago when I wrote my last reflection.
Reading back through the February introspection, what I expressed about the project seems so innocent. I had felt the strain of maintaining the streak when I played an out of town tournament and was thinking of ways to cope with that at future tournaments. Now I am wondering when tournament tennis will even resume. It will be quite some time.
In the background of this project, I had been making forays into asking rules questions of the USTA, the ITF, and Tennis Australia. Of the three, only Tennis Australia has responded to date, and it was delightful. My love of Tennis Australia continues to grow unabated. Maybe I just haven’t found the right contact point for the ITF and the USTA. In any case, I have temporarily halted the submission of new questions because I think those organizations are occupied with other things at the moment. It all seems so trivial.
I am really proud of the series of posts that started with “A Fact Checking Pause.” The subject of that series forced me to perform actual research to make sure my facts were in alignment. This required usage of electronic resources only accessible from physical presence at my local library. My city’s library is closed as a non-essential service during the COVID-19 crisis.
Earlier this month, I felt compelled to write about how to play tennis safely and in compliance with social distancing in the COVID-19 era. It is a topic that is way heavier than I would have anticipated tackling at the onset of this project. It is by far the most read and most shared post in the series to date.
I am becoming more and more confident that I will achieve the one page a day streak in 2020. My top concern at the moment is that either myself or a family member becomes ill. That would shift priorities dramatically. It is a worry that transcends this project.
Here is hoping world looks a little brighter after April than it does as March comes to a close.
