An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
When I played junior tennis there were two ways to enter a tennis tournament. One was to visit the host facility of the event to register and pay the entry fee. The other was to fill out a physical entry form and mail it into the host organization with a check. This is the point in the story where the umpire I gave birth to usually interjects to ask about the stone tablet postage rates for those entry forms.
One of my favorite sayings is “When all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.” When thinking about how to retain junior players as they transition into adult tennis, tournaments are like the USTA’s hammer while leagues are the USTA’s wrench. Both are valuable tools, unless confronted with a screw.
Yesterday I expressed skepticism that the reason that junior players do not transition directly into adult tournaments is because they are confused about the structure. I believe that the real point of uncertainty is understanding how they fit within the NTRP system. That difficulty arises both when looking for an event to play as well as during the self-rating process.
This weekend I am continuing to consider the changes in USTA Adult Tournament Structure coming in 2021. In my initial viewing of the official USTA webinar on these upcoming changes, I observed that transitioning juniors into adult tournaments is one of the projected benefits of the updates.
As a general rule, I am not a big fan of biographies about tennis players. I double down on that statement when the book is positioned as an autobiography. The simple fact of the matter is that if I am going to read a book about tennis I am looking for a return on the investment of time. For me, that narrowly boils down to books that can help me play at a higher competitive level and books that help me understand the history of tennis.
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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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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.