Six Weeks to a Better Level of Tennis: Week Zero
Today I am shifting gears and announcing a little side project that I am embarking upon. Put another way, this little “Fiend at Court” side project now has a side project.
Ball Strikes Ball
Unless the umpire who gave birth to me rats me out to the umpire I gave birth to, I am probably going to skate by without a lot of blow back from being wrong on this one. The umpire I gave birth to does not regularly read this blog.
2 responsesA Good Return: Housekeeping
So many times in this project I have made a plan on how to cover material, only to veer off onto a rabbit trail or discover that I don’t have as much to write about a given topic as I anticipate. With that backdrop, let me outline my intended content over the next three days.
A Good Return (Net) Post Scripts
The next two subsections of “A Good Return” deal with unusual situations involving the net post. I have never personally encountered either of these situations in a live match.
2 responsesMore Good Returns
As mentioned yesterday, I inadvertently thoroughly covered many of the cases in “A Good Return” within the ITF Rules of Tennis. As a result, I am anticipating that we will move through this section with an unprecedented speed to content ratio.
A Good Return
Today we celebrate moving into “A Good Return” in the ITF Rules of Tennis as published within the USTA Friend at Court. Sometimes in tennis vernacular, the word “return” is specific to the first shot after a service. However in the rules of tennis, the word return includes every shot after the service.
Tennis (Net) Pipes
At first glance, the last USTA Comment in the “Player Loses Point” section in the ITF Rules of Tennis is arguably the most bizarre encountered to date. The comment is related to a net configuration that I initially had difficulty imagining.
Tennis Racquet Clashes
It is pretty common in doubles for two doubles players to simultaneously attempt to play a ball resulting in a clash of racquets. While this happens most frequently at the net, it can actually anywhere on the court with one exception.
No Fair Catch in Tennis
The final case ruling in the “Player Loses Point” section in the ITF Rules of Tennis is one that almost everyone has absentmindedly violated from time to time. The technical term for this is “brain fart.”
Getting Pegged by the Serve… Again
A couple of days ago, I smugly observed that I had delayed discussion on jumping over the net in the middle of a point. That deferral was because I knew it was coming up in a future case ruling and I needed to leave myself something to write about. Today I am confronted by an ITF Case Decision that I have already covered fairly thoroughly. Oops.