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Lighten Up: The Happiness Project Courting: A Tennis Memoir A Case Against NTRP Ratings Expiration Putting It All Together: My Daily Plantar Fasciitis Prevention Routine Tennis Beyond the Headlines: March 31, 2025 A Mother’s Day and Father’s Day Gift Idea A Great Gift for Grads… and Tennis Players

Farewell, Fair Oaks

Effective January 1, 2021, the Fair Oaks Tennis Center in Dallas is permanently closed. To the best of my knowledge, the only place where the closure notification has been published is on the Facebook page for the facility. The announcement of the impending shut down was first shared on December 6.

Tennis Net Tension, Pickleball, and Wrenches

In the earliest days of this site, I posed the rhetorical question, “How do I not routinely carry a socket wrench in my bag to adjust net tension?” That quote came from “I just can’t handle the tension!” which was published on January 9, 2020 and discussed the rules around the proper tension for the net. At the time, I lamented that I had never seen a USTA umpire check the tension of the net prior to the match.

Fiend at Court Year in Review 2020

On this final day of 2020, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past year. This site emerged from a goal that I set for myself on New Year’s Eve in 2019. Specifically I wanted to write a page a day about tennis in 2020. The fact that this was done publicly via a blog was an accountability afterthought. Today I am celebrating successful achievement of that goal.