An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
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.
1 response
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.
1 response
Our steady march through the ITF Rules of Tennis as published in the USTA Friend at Court has arrived at the point where we are entitled to a break. Specifically the break between sets.
The hosts of Compete Like a Champion periodically speculate that one of the reasons that Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have exhibited unprecedented career longevity is because they are doing the majority of their conditioning and interval training on low impact cardio equipment such as an exercise bike or elliptical trainer.
The draft of the updated USTA League Regulations for 2021 was published back in July. It has been on my radar as a future topics for the Fiend at Court “Tennis News You Can Use” focus which runs every Monday. It just kept sliding down in favor of other items that seemed more urgent or interesting to me at the time.
2 responses
This is the second of a two part series on the draw formats that are available to USTA tennis tournament organizers under the new consolidated framework for 2021. Yesterday I introduced the table and described the Round Robin and Round Robin with Playoff formats. Today I am describing the remaining options that are available to tournament organizers.