Tennis: It's In the Bag

I ran across a hilarious story of ingenuity at the National Senior Women’s Clay Court Championships a couple of weeks ago. I was gathering material for an upcoming article on tennis bags slated for the May edition of the NWTO Newsletter. That quest turned out to be a great spark for conversation at the tournament.

I was surprised to discover that the players I talked to at the Clays don’t regard many things they have in their bags as unusual. If it has occurred to them to carry an item, they assume the other players are doing the same. An alternative explanation is that anything unique that might provide a competitive edge is a closely held secret.

Carolyn Nichols shared that she usually carries a knife, which can be a challenge given current TSA regulations. I think we can all agree that Carolyn is a player not to be trifled with, even without the knowledge that she is packing a shiv. A more innocuous, and as it turns out, accurate, explanation is that Carolyn uses her knife for cutting up fruit.

I was also trying to find the player with the “most expired” shelf-stable food items in their tennis bag. There were many tales of liquified bananas and mummified fruit. (If you haven’t ever allowed a banana to rot in your bag, are you even playing recreational-competitive tennis?) Andi Polisky once found an orange that had withered to the size of a golf ball. I failed to find a single person who currently had an expired food item in their bag. Many people observed that they routinely check and refresh the contents of their bags before traveling to Level 1 Championships.

I plan to continue the quest looking for tales of the most ingenious ways the things in our tennis bags have been pressed into service. That topic is directly inspired by Canadian Anne Rungi, who shared a hilarious account of how an item in her bag was used when returning home from a Level 1 Indoor tournament during the Covid era.

Anne couldn’t locate the mask she thought was stowed in her tennis bag as she arrived at the airport. However, she did have a spare pair of panties, which is a universally standard item in the bags of Senior women’s tennis players. Fast thinking led her to use the undergarment as an improvised mask for her flight home. Anne was kind enough to share a picture with me.