An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
I am continuing to encounter horror after horror in the “Correcting Errors” section of the ITF Rules of Tennis as published in the USTA Friend at Court. My only consolation is that after today there are only four additional subsections of this rule to cover. This section will all be over by Labor Day.
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Shortly after last week’s “Hawk-Eye Live” post was issued, I realized that I failed to mention my favorite feature of the system. Hawk-Eye Live includes a multitude of voices that annunciate the actual line calls. The system includes male, female, and multiple accents. The diversity delights me.
I was recently appointed to a team working on a corporate initiative to improve the culture of innovation at my place of employment. Consequently the synaptic connections in my brain were already primed with research, thoughts, and data on innovation long before news of the new 2021 USTA Adult Tournament Structure started hitting my inbox.
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Yesterday I ended the “The @USTATexas Qualified CTAs” post with a challenge to locate the undocumented qualified Community Tennis Association (CTA) that was missing from the USTA Texas CTA Directory. It’s North Houston (NoHo). NoHo regularly sends very competitive teams to the USTA Texas Sectional Championships, but does not appear at all in the CTA directory.
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One of my more offbeat memories from my junior tennis days was people sidling up to the umpire who gave birth to me to ask if they could get a copy of her detailed tennis maps of various cities scattered across our local section. As the oldest child in a tennis playing family it was my birthright to ride shotgun which also put me in the role of navigator. I had a close personal connection to those maps.
USTA Texas has a concept known as a “Qualified” Community Tennis Association (CTA.) Essentially a Qualified CTA is one that can send a team directly to sectionals without additional playoffs being required. While the term “qualified” is used in the USTA Texas League operating procedures, that usage is unrelated to CTA designation.
The final installment in the “obvious three” series is Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis–Lessons from a Master, by Brad Gilbert. Winning Ugly is the essential companion to Inner Tennis. I wish I could claim that observation, but it is actually asserted in the forward of Winning Ugly. I mean, who wouldn’t want to hitch their plow to the tennis book juggernaut that is Inner Tennis.
If a player serves out of turn during a tie-break game and the error is discovered after an even number of points have been played, the error is corrected immediately. If the error is discovered after an odd number of points have been played, the order of service shall remain as altered.
The only reason that I was aware that Hawk-Eye Live was in use for this year’s WTT event is because it has failed to make a call on a couple of occasions. Those errors of omission were quickly overruled by the chair umpire. It made me wonder about the error rate of the Hawk-Eye system and how it works exactly.
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One sure sign that tennis is gearing up for the resumption of play following the COVID-19 hiatus is the bow wave of requests to sign waivers currently populating my email inbox. Waivers will clearly be required to participate in organized tennis going forward and in some cases to use facilities at all. Not surprisingly, this new wave of waivers includes updated language addressing transmission of communicable disease while playing tennis. It makes me nostalgic for the days when tearing an ACL or other physical injury was the primary concern.