[Breeze]

Following on the heals of Young Drachma’s great real life tennis coaching dynasty, I thought I’d post one on my upcoming tennis season.

It’s been about 15 years since I played tennis in any competitive league, so be glad you’re just going to read about how I do and you aren’t forced to watch my old, fat ass run (wobble?) around the court. My absence from the sport started with a wrist injury and then was prolonged as I focused on my kids and their sports, specifically their swimming. When I was younger, I was a team captain for around 9 years, and our teams progressed to a relatively high level, but absence from the sport, combined with age and increased weight has made my return difficult to say the least.

Let’s start with a quick overview of the league. In Atlanta we have a tennis organization called ALTA which is huge. It had around 80,000 members pre-pandemic (around 50,000 currently), and is the largest tennis-based community organization in the world*. Unlike USTA which gives each player a rating, and then the player finds a team at that level or higher to play on, ALTA simply rates a team and promotes/demotes teams to higher or lower levels based on the results of the season (demotions are much less likely and usually are only considered if the captain requests it). Obviously, this creates some significant variance in the quality of the players on each team. ALTA’s ranking system goes from AA-1 down to C9 (that’s my recollection - I honestly didn’t look it back up), with each division typically consisting of 8 teams. The regular season is a round robin format where you play each team in your conference and you earn a point for each match won, with the conference winner and the runner up making the playoffs (occasionally a 3rd place team slips into the playoffs if the division doesn’t have 8 conferences). Unlike USTA, there are no singles, all 5 matches in a week are doubles.

I don’t know much about my team other than it’s a Senior Mens’ team and it’s playing C-1. This is an offshoot team my best friend has been on for a couple of seasons (just regular men’s league – this is the first senior team they have fielded), and he asked me to join. I believe the minimum age to compete is 45. It took a while before I could be added due to an error the captain made, but now that I’m on the roster I can tell the conference has only 7 teams so the schedule consists of 6 matches and a bye week. Also the matches are just 4 doubles not 5. It also appears like the team is going to struggle to get 8 players ever week, so I expect quite a few forfeits.

Recently, the only practice I’ve had is playing with my best friend every Monday night. We hit around and work on stuff, then play a set or two afterwards. In total, I’ve only hit 8 or so times and it’s been all singles to this point. The team practices are on Thursdays and the matches are Friday nights. The first Thursday practice was rained out, and the first week of the season was our teams bye week. Also looks like practice today (6/10) will also be rained out.

How about an honest assessment of my game? Well I’m pretty average.

Style of play – In my younger days I played a backboard type of game. I wasn’t a pusher, I have some ok strokes, but I definitely moved well, covered a lot of court and forced my opponent to hit an extra shot. Now that I’m older, I cover significantly less court, and the redirection of my body takes much longer to accomplish. Also I get winded much easier so recovering from long runs is difficult. It’s still the only way I really know how to play though, so I do the best I can with that approach. I have become better at picking spots and simply applauding shots I would have tried to track down in the past.

Forehand – I play more of a control racket so I generate my own power and when I’m hitting well I have a heavy top spin shot that I can keep deep in the court. The only drawback is, because I have a lot of top spin, the ball can be high where it crosses the net, which makes poaching it easy at times, especially against a strong net player.

Backhand – in my younger days I was almost exclusively a cut backhand. I was pretty good at keeping it low and having it skid. I had a top spin backhand, but I almost never used it because I didn’t have any confidence in it. Now that I’m older and I have no reasonable expectation of being good, I hit the top spin backhand more frequently. I still cut most of what I hit though. I’d say I’ve gone from 2% top spin backhands to around 30%.

Net – I have never been great at the net. A lot of drilling allowed me to call myself average, but now with absence and age – I’m terrible. I have a hard time focusing on a ball coming right at me and I’m slow to react. I’m going to need to get this improved for doubles or I’m really going to hamper my partner

Serve – this has been the big surprise. My serve is actually better now than it was before. It takes forever for my shoulder to loosen up, but once it does I’ve been strong serving in my Monday matches. Some of it may go back to the no expectation comment from above, but my serve is more consistently powerful and I don’t really have a second serve any longer, I just hit the same serve all the time. My double fault totals are up slightly but my service winners/aces are up disproportionately higher, so it’s a good trade off.

Return of serve – this has always been one of my strengths. In fact, in singles, it was common for me to beat my brother, who’s really a better player than I am because his top spin serve was right in my wheelhouse, and I’d drill the return deep at his feet and give him fits. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how my return of serve is currently. My best friend has a monster serve that he changes frequently in spin, placement, and speed, which makes it difficult for me to get into a groove. I’ve had some strong moments against him, so I think I’ll be ok.

The team was hoping to add my bother and me, but my brother played on a team ranked higher than this one last season so he’s unavailable. They were planning to add both of us to the men’s team roster in the fall, but it’s looking more and more like this team won’t survive to field a team in the fall – so I’ll be looking for a team to join in a few months.

*note – from the ALTA Website.