re: 2017 Non-GS Tennis Thread

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In our league, the captains go through all this trouble trying to guess what the other captains will do with their lineups, and it usually ends up being a waste of time.

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Stacking in USTA is just stupid, a waste of time, and quite frankly, I think chicken shite.

Regarding college, I believe there is an "unwritten" rule against stacking, but it happens at the time.

It's pretty much the honor system. But the coach has to rank the entire team and slot the players accordingly. Universal Tennis Rating is more accurate than the USTA rating system imo.

Koslov took out Stevie pretty easily.

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Rafael Nadal - top 10 superstitions/tics that he always does.

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Good video

Gotcha

Ah man, I thought Rafa was playing queen's club. Sad face.

Stan isn't great on grass since he needs a high bounce and I can see Raonic losing in two tiebreaker. But, six time champ Murray losing to a lucky loser? What in the heck?

Enforced how?

Kewl: I'm not one of these guys, but we went to the same high school

LINK

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To make Nationals at 4.5 is pretty impressive. There's a lot of former college players and club pros at that level, at least out here.

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Yeah, and I'm sort of surprised that team did as well as it did. Kenan, Andy, and Bryan were all in their mid-20s right out of college, and so those are the guys who were playing the singles slots. And, yes, all of them played college tennis, but none of them major college tennis. Bryan played #3 at Davidson, Kenan #2 at Liberty. Andy played very briefly for Va. Tech -- I don't think he was much of a student...may have flunked out -- and then ended up playing #1 or #2 for Bluefield College a few years later, not sure if there was a stop in between.*

Mark is a very solid tennis player but was in his mid 50s by that point. And Randy, at his very best, was the best guy on the team, and who definitely could have played big conference tennis had he really wanted to,** but he was probably 37 at the time, had been a practicing physician for ten years at that point, and was never a guy who was particularly committed to staying in shape or regularly playing tennis. And, finally, Ryan was just never that great.

And I don't know any of the other guys...so maybe a few of them were solid doubles players, but still it seems like there would be other teams out there that would have a few better young college guys that hadn't yet been bumped to 5.0. I guess not, though.

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*To be fair, Andy won states in singles in WV twice,...he was a good player (and a good dude) but just maybe not the most ambitious guy and a guy that never really appeared to love the game (unlike his dad, Mark, who is a lifelong tennis nut).

**Randy was one of the most natural tennis players I've ever seen. He took up the sport at like 14, and because he'd always played ping pong, he started gripping his forehand with his index finger extended along the length of the grip, which made for this super unorthdox, completely self taught, and absolutely filthy wristy forehand that he could hit the craziest angles on. He played #1 for bluefield college for 4 years and was the player of the year in his conference one year, which leads you to believe he could been a middle position guy at a bigger school. Randy is one of those guys you wonder how good he could have been had he started earlier and been more ambitious about it. He was our HS coach my junior and senior years, and at that point was in his final year in medical school and didn't play regularly or stay in great shape, and he would regularly beat Bryan (our #1...and one of the guys discussed above) in the 6-3 or 6-4 range, and me (our #2) in the 6-1, 6-2 range.