An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
I am not originally from the DFW area. I was born and raised in Wichita Falls, Texas. Every once in a while, as I contemplate my options as I near retirement from my day job, the idea pops into my head to consider moving back to my childhood hometown. The complete absence of organized adult competitive tennis always quickly dispatches that option. I simply cannot live in a tennis wasteland.
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In “Geography Lessons from USTA Texas,” we learned the secret locations of the center of each of the five large cities in Texas as officially designated by USTA Texas Section office. This makes it possible to draw those circles on a map with a high degree of precision. As a player in the DFW area, I have always been very curious about what that map actually looks like.
The Inner Game of Tennis is the only book I will make the following statement about. You can say that you are serious about improving your game, but if you have not bothered to read this book, you’re kidding yourself.
As previously discussed in “Rules of Tennis: Order of Service,” I have a near religious reverence for the Order of Service. In fact, I am appalled to see that it is not capitalized within the Correcting Errors section. Anything that impinges on the sanctity of the Order of Service makes me a little edgy.
In my junior development days, there were basically only two drills that the coaches used for conditioning. The first was to line the kids up on the outside of one of the doubles alleys and have us “run lines” which is essentially just a series of short sprints. The second was running some number of specified laps around the tennis center, or later when I was playing scholastic tennis the adjacent track around the football practice field.
As the USTA works through the ongoing effort that re-imagines the structure of the organization to get closer to players at the local level, I think that the concept of “encourage and foster” has to be one of the primary guiding principles.
During a standard game or a tie-break game, if the players are at the wrong ends of the court, the error should be corrected as soon as it is discovered and the server shall serve from the correct end of the court according to the score.
As I was watching “Schroders Battle of the Brits” a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that Andy Murray was wearing what I assumed to be a back brace during one of his early matches. I was trying to figure out the exact nature of his new apparent ailment before I noticed that all the other players were also wearing the same device.
As I wrote about yesterday in “Mowing the Grassroots of the USTA House”, I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between the USTA national office, the individual USTA sections, the local USTA Community Tennis Associations (CTAs), and the local league players. Today I want to focus very specifically on the CTAs. I suspect that a lot of players are only vaguely aware of CTAs and the purpose they serve in the USTA ecosystem.
The USTA is in the midst of a restructuring effort that has been accelerated due to financial strains brought on by the COVID-19 epidemic. Currently the USTA is re-imagining the structure of the organization to get closer to players at the local level. The restructuring of the USTA was previously covered in “Job Cuts at the USTA.”