An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
Yesterday my post included a map of all the currently confirmed USTA National Level Adult tournaments for 2021. Under the consolidated Adult Tournament Framework rolling out in January these tournaments are designated at Levels 1, 2, and 3. Today I am zooming in on the tournaments specifically in Texas. For anyone who is new here, Texas is my home section.
To stick a pin in this moment in time, the general population of the United States has spent the last 3 days obsessively staring at maps because the presidential race from the general election last Tuesday has yet to be decided. It may seem like an inopportune time to throw another map into the mix, but this site is nothing if not inopportune.
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The fact that I am writing about Loving the Battle by Mark Tjia this week is an unanticipated side effect of the review I posted last week. Last week’s selection remains a mystery, and I continue to decline to name either the book or the author since my comments were less than flattering. That omission triggered a couple of guesses as to the identity of the book. One of the guesses started “Surely you don’t mean Loving the Battle…”
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It seems odd to find the rules for the warm-up in tennis relatively close to the conclusion of the main body of the rules. In the ITF Rules of Tennis, as printed in the USTA Friend at Court, the warm-up period is defined in the very last item in the “Continuous Play” section.
Last week in “Low-Impact Interval Training” I outlined a training routine that I developed after learning that USTA Player Development regularly uses low-impact cardio machines for interval training. Low-Impact refers to the amount of stress placed on the joints. The workout itself is extremely high intensity and effort. If I am going to work that hard, then I am also going to collect data to know if it is effective.
The USTA quietly published a spreadsheet listing the confirmed 2021 National level tournaments for adults earlier this week. The file attributes indicate that the spreadsheet was created on 20 October and last updated 23 October. That is about as close to “hot off the press” that this site will ever get.
When the calendar rolls over to November each year and the USTA Texas Master’s championship has concluded, I start to scan my mail box for the Texas Tennis Tournament Guide for the coming season. Each year the Texas Section Office mails out a catalog that contains a list of the tournaments scheduled for the coming year.
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There are three fundamental ways that rankings points can motivate play. 1) Rankings points are used as selection criteria for events with limited capacity for players. 2) Seeding in tournaments is almost always done off the rankings lists. 3) Some players just enjoy seeing their name in print on the rankings list.
Rankings points matter for more than just the position where a tennis player’s name appears in a list. Sometimes rankings points translate to selection to play in nationally and internationally significant events. That incentive is most pronounced in the upper echelons, but it has also been replicated at the sectional level for NTRP levels in the USTA Texas Section.
I am pre-disposed to like tennis books. I usually manage to find some redeeming value in every tennis book that I read. For the first time in my life, I have encountered a book that breaks that generalization. I would assign it one star on an amazon review, but only because there is no option for zero stars. It is that bad.
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