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Vic Braden’s Quick Fixes: Expert Cures for Common Tennis Problems The NTRP Championships Rules Get Weird Quadruped Alternating Toe Mobility Stretches Tennis Beyond the Headlines: February 24, 2025 For the Love of Competition Rankings Point-Chasers The Importance of Why

12 “Gifts” To Improve Your Tennis Life (Part 1)

In December of 2020 I gave a Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) webinar on 12 “Gifts” to jumpstart a career in cybersecurity. Each item in that list is a practice or habit that I regard as a career success factor. I was recently reviewing my own performance against those items over the past year had the sudden realization that the same core concepts would be equally effective if framed out in terms of tennis. This weekend I am launching into a whirlwind tour of those twelve items focusing on how each of those can advance and improve your tennis life.

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A (Non-Tennis) Book Recommendation to Round Out 2021

I am expected to regularly deliver “talks” and conference presentations as a part of my day job. This year in those settings, I have consistently issued a strong recommendation for people to read Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers. In some cases, my language is couched as an imperative. If I could I would wave a magic wand and get everybody in the United States to read this particular book, I would do it.

USTA League Partial Round Robin Rules

Since formation of USTA League teams for 2022 is already in high swing, now is the perfect time to take an advance look at new rules which are expected to come into effect. The 2022 USTA League Regulations (apparently) have yet to be officially released. However, a draft document was circulated for review last June that is probably close enough for our purposes.

SwingVision and the Cone Game

The “Cone Game” is one of my favorite tennis practice drills. It is a great development tool because it gets the players into an Zen-like focus that is still layered with the pressure of competition. I recently used the SwingVision during a practice session that included the Cone Game and was very happy with the results. I continue to be completely enamored with the SwingVision application and service.

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Adult and Junior Tournaments: Distant Cousins in the USTA Family Tree

USTA is a massive non-profit organization with a certain number of full time paid staff. However, most of the the work is largely performed by a cadre of volunteers grouped into numerous committees. Yesterday I wrote about differences between the Adult and Junior tennis tournament Regulations and Ranking procedures. The origins for that divergence can be traced directly to the USTA organization structure for the committees that own those documents.

Surprising? Differences in a “Unified” System

There are striking differences between USTA Adult and Junior tournament regulations. The same can be said about the respective ranking systems. Over the past couple of months, I have written a lot about errors and inconsistencies in the USTA Adult regulations and ranking system. In the background, I frequently reference the equivalent documentation that governs Junior competition for additional insight and perspective. The fact that the Adult and Junior documents are vastly different is immediately apparent even on casual review. The fundamental question is this: Should those differences exist?

Updating USTA Regulations, Schoolhouse Rock Style

Last Sunday I described a request I made to the USTA Adult Competition Committee to update the glossary in the USTA Adult and Family Tournament, Ranking, and Sanctioning Regulations. Today I want to step through the process for how that actually occurs. To keep this topic from being as boring as it… Well, actually is… I am going to unapologetically leverage the linguistic style of the Schoolhouse Rock classic, “I’m just a Bill.”

My Notable Tennis Book Whiffs From 2021

I don’t think it is unreasonable to stake the claim that the Fiend at Court has independently reviewed more tennis books over the last two years than any other site. That being said, there were quite a few notable titles first published this year that I never got around to reading. (So many books, so little time.) Today I am sharing books from 2021 that are in personal reading queue that I plan to get around to covering… eventually.