An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
Today marks the 770th consecutive daily post to appear on Fiend at Court. This site was launched on New Year’s Eve in 2019 as a personal goal accountability mechanism to write a page a day about tennis the following year. At the end of the first year, it was an easy decision to keep on going. The people who read this blog on a regular basis were a significant factor. Thank you for joining me on this journey of discovery.
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The theme for this weekend is “The Gift of Gratitude for Tennis.” If you participate in league play, you should consider writing a thank you note to the team captain or league organizer at the end of every season. If you think your captain has an easy job, then your captain is doing a terrific job. Chance are a lot is going on behind the scenes to build that perception. If captaining looks hard from your perspective… it is.
Heading into New Year’s Eve in 2021, I shared twelve “Gifts” that people can give to themselves to jumpstart their tennis life. Each item on that list is essentially a tennis related life hack shamelessly adapted from a cybersecurity career development webinar that I gave back in 2019. I am taking a more in depth look at each one of those items first Friday of each month this year. In February we are focusing on the “Gift” of Gratitude.
In 2021, I mentioned on this site that I was interested in finding a copy of Althea Gibson’s autobiography. At that time, the book was long out of print and the only available copies were priced as a collectors items and way too rich for my blood. Later in the year, I was delighted when Randy Walker of New Chapter Press published a digitized version of the book once again making this book available to the masses.
In her women’s finals at the Australian Open against eventual champion Ash Barty, Danielle Collins snapped of a forehand with so much force that her “lucky” bracelet flew off her wrist. Quite frankly I am always astonished at players who can play with anything loose on their wrist. The fact that she broke the metal clasp during a tennis stroke is also fairly impressive.
I have been suffering from heel pain due to plantar fasciitis. While I generally follow the treatment advice for that malady, when the suggestion inevitably comes to switch to only low-impact activities for awhile, it is a bridge too far. It simply isn’t a viable option for me. Tennis will be played no matter what. Recently, I have settled in on a sock configuration that minimizes heel pain both during and after tennis. I call it my “Socktail.”
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Data integrity issues surface over Novak Djokovic’s positive Covid test, the “Barty Party” fuels a participation spike in Australia, and Danielle Collins plays the AO finals without a clothing or shoe contract.
NTRP tournaments are an important part of the adult tennis ecosystem. Implemented correctly, it is a developmental pipeline for players to improve their competitive level and potentially even advance to a level of performance that leads to participation in age-group Open events. At the same time, NTRP tournaments are a participation drain on Senior age group Open tournament play. This post outlines how NTRP tennis should be integrated into the USTA “unified” tournament framework to maximize the benefits while minimizing the downside. Spoiler alert: There is no perfect solution.
Conducting National Championships is woven into the very fiber of the USTA’s existence. When the organization was confronted with the problem of declining participation in tournaments and focused on increasing play at NTRP events, the most natural “solution” was creation of a National Championship. As soon as a tournament is designated as a “National Championship,” it is also almost a foregone conclusion that it will be Level 1 in the USTA framework. Unfortunately, that sequence of completely logical thought breaks the rankings pyramid and hurts the overall tournament ecosystem.
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USTA tennis tournaments are played under a 7 tier unified framework. As previously discussed on this site, unification between the Adult and Junior system pretty much stops past the description that the framework has 7 tiers. The USTA tournament regulations that govern Adult and Junior play are separate and distinctly different documents. There is also divergence between Adult age group tennis and the Adult NTRP tournament system even though they co-exist within the same regulations. When NTRP tournaments were layered in to the existing Adult age group open system, it created a square peg and round hole situation.