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2012 USTA SENIOR MIXED NATIONAL INVITATIONAL
CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE |
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The USTA
ranks players according to their ability and as a new player I rated myself
at the lowest level of 2.5.
There are dozens of different classifications of teams; youth, adult,
senior, super senior, mixed, combo etc.
Our local club was forming a 6.0 Fifty Mixed team which means you
have to be 50 or older to join, one man and one woman play doubles against a
similar mixed team, and the combined ranking of each two-person cannot
exceed 6.0. As a 2.5 ranked
man, I will need to play with a 3.5 ranked woman.
Seventeen people signed up for our team, eight men and nine women.
Our Captain is Donna Ellery and our Co-captain is Jay Shoemaker.
Our season is from September through November, during which time we
play eight matches. Each match
consists of three 2-person teams playing three 2-person teams from another
club. About half the matches
are played on our home courts, and the other half are away-matches.
To win a match, a team has to win two out of three sets.
In addition to our matches, our Captains would schedule weekly
clinics with a local tennis pro.
Oftentimes we would also arrange to play with each other, so at this
point I am probably playing tennis five times a week.
There
are only two other 6.0 Fifty Mixed teams in our area, one in Napa and the
other in Vallejo, so we played each team four times during the regular
season. Playing mostly with Kim
Thoma, I was able to win 83% of my matches, which included a default win.
Our team also did well, and in December we won a playoff against Napa
to see who would go on to the Sectional Championship Match in Walnut Creek,
CA on January 25-27, 2013.
Everyone was excited to participate in the Sectional
Championships so the team redoubled our efforts to practice.
Having spent the last month traveling in Mexico & China, I had not
played tennis at all, and was concerned I was rusty.
In order to play in the Sectionals, participants must have played in
at least two matches during the regular season.
Of the seventeen people on our team, only thirteen were eligible to
play, making it more difficult for the captains to assign the teams.
Furthermore, three days before the start of the tournament, my
partner Kim, twisted her knee and could not play.
But after juggling the rooster, I was teamed with Amy Shively who is
also a 3.5 player and should be able to carry me as well as Kim.
Amy and I were able to get in a couple hours of practice together
before our first match on Saturday, January 26th.
Walnut
Creek is only a half-hour south of Fairfield.
Our team met at our own club and practiced for an hour before
car-pooling down to Club Sport where the tournament was being held.
The Sectional Championships are for all four levels of Fifty Mixed
Doubles, so there are 6.0, 7.0, 8.0 and 9.0 teams.
There are hundreds of people playing on about 20 courts, during the
three day event. We were
supposed to start play at 1:00PM, but the morning matches were running
behind schedule and we were told to expect a 2-hour delay.
But then at about 12:45PM, USTA officials found several additional
courts a couple miles away and decided to send the 6.0 players to this
different venue in order to get back on schedule.
Not too
long after 1:00PM, we began our match against Cupertino.
Amy and I played on court 1 against Nanita Metha & Alan Whittaker and
were able to win in two sets 6-4, 7-5.
Both of our other teams played hard, splitting the first two sets,
but loosing tie-breakers for the third.
So at the end of the first day, we had won one match and lost two
matches.
Ying was
returning from China on Sunday and I needed to pick her up at the airport at
noon. I told Donna that if she
needed me to play again on Sunday, I could do so in the morning, but not in
the afternoon. Late Saturday
night, Donna called me and said she had rearranged the schedule and wanted
me to play with Amy again on Sunday morning.
The morning match was due to start at 8:30AM so we arrived an hour
early to warm-up. We would play
Diamond Hills in the morning and then Courtside from the Lower SF Peninsula
in the afternoon.
On court
18, Amy and I met Ron Garcia & Cindy Williamson of the Diamond Hills Club.
They took the first set 2-6, but we came back in the second to tie
the match 6-2. Although we were
down 1-5 in the 10-point tie-breaker, we rallied to win 10-8.
The other two matches that morning were blow-outs 6-1, 6-2 and 6-3,
6-0 so we swept Diamond Hills 3-0.
At noon
I left Walnut Creek to pick up Ying at the airport.
She arrived on-time and we got home by 1:30 and proceeded to go to
sleep as she had jet-lag and I had tennis-lag.
When we awoke around 6:00PM I had a message from Donna that we had
not only won the match against Courtside 2-1, but our team had won the
overall Sectional Championships for our 6.0 level, and would now go on to
the National Championships in Chattanooga, Tennessee on March 22-24, 2013.
For the
next two months I played tennis 4-5 times a week.
Our team practiced together, and played matches against each other.
I continued taking lessons and could feel my game was getting better.
Jay arranged for The Francis Ford Coppola Winery, and our local
tennis club, In-Shape, to sponsor a portion of our trip to Chattanooga.
Ten of
the seventeen people on our team made the trip to Chattanooga.
Additionally, Ying, Jay’s wife Suyeng, Yolanda’s husband Michael, and
a local pro, Mike Fischer travelled with our group.
Arriving on different flights we met at The Champions Club in
Chattanooga for practice on Thursday, March 21st.
It is freezing now in Chattanooga and the forecast for the next three
days is rain or possibly even snow!
Most of
us are staying at
The Chattanoogan
Hotel in downtown Chattanooga.
Thursday evening we all met and went to dinner at
St. John’s
Restaurant, the number one ranked restaurant of 533 in the city.
We had a fabulous dinner, featuring Coppola wines, which lasted until
well after everyone else had left the building.
Friday
morning our matches began. There
are twelve teams competing in the 6.0 division from all over the USA,
including Hawaii & the Caribbean.
We were at The Champions Club by 8:00AM.
At 9:30AM we were scheduled to play Southern States based in South
Carolina. I was paired with Amy
Shively on court 5. Our
opponents were Holgar Spann and Kathi Amaker.
Amy and I won the first set 6-4, but lost the second 5-7.
In the tie-breaker we lost 8-10.
Our other players also lost.
George and Yolanda lost in two sets and Mark & Laurie lost in a
tie-breaker. Southern States was
a very tough team.
After a
quick trip over to Best Buy to get a battery charger for Ying’s camera, we
returned to The Champions Club for another match Friday afternoon.
This time we would take on the Middle States, based in Pennsylvania.
At 2:00PM, Kim Thoma and I met Tim Bentz and Kristine Arndt on court
6. We got off to a good start
and ended up winning the match 6-4, 6-3.
Jay and Yolanda won their match in two sets as did Brooks and Laurie.
At the end of day one, we had won three sets and lost three sets.
Friday
night the USTA had scheduled a dinner and cruise on the Tennessee River
aboard
The Southern Belle, a paddlewheel ship.
We joined hundreds of other players for dinner, but decided to
disembark before the cruise and returned to our hotel where we continued to
party at the bar.
Saturday
morning the weather was still questionable and the USTA had decided to move
the matches indoors.
Unfortunately, The Champions Club has no indoor courts, so players were
disbursed all over town to different venues to contest their matches.
We were told to go to
Manker Pattern Tennis Club, which was only a couple miles from our
hotel. The match would not start
until 2:00PM so Ying & I joined Michael & Yolanda for lunch at a little
Italian restaurant on The Bluff, overlooking the river.
When we arrived at Maker Pattern around 1:00PM, we learned that since
the forecasted rain had not started, they were going to try to play two of
our three matches outside.
Considerable efforts were made to dry the courts using lots of towels and by
2:00PM we were able to get started.
Playing
again with Kim, we took on Clairo Paredes and Linda Chang, both 3.0 players
from Southern California.
Knowing that we needed to win all three matches today to have any chance of
playing in the finals, Kim and I played very well, winning the first set
6-1, and the second set 6-3. Jay
and Yolanda also won their match in two sets.
After our matches we went indoors to watch Brooks and Donna play.
They won their first set, lost the second and lost the tie-breaker.
Going into this match, Southern California had been in the lead and
their loss to us had knocked them out of the running for a playoff berth.
But we did not earn a playoff position either so Southern States
would win our flight and compete Saturday night against Caribbean to see who
would proceed to the finals on Sunday.
Our team
had played very well and while were disappointed that we would not make the
finals, everyone had played their best and our three match loss on the first
day would eventually prove to be to the overall winner.
We returned to the hotel where we met again for a team dinner at The
Broad Street Grill Saturday night.
We had many toasts to each other and the two organizations which had
partially sponsored our trip to compete at the Nationals.
After dinner many people continued the celebration at the bar, buy
Ying and I went to sleep.
While we
were partying Saturday night, Southern States beat The Caribbean 3-0 to go
on the final match Sunday morning.
Pacific Northwest beat Florida 3-0 to earn the other berth in the
finals.
Ying and
I awoke early Sunday morning to go watch the finals.
It took some detective work to find out where the match was being
held as it was still raining and impossible to play outdoors.
Kim, Amy, Ying and I drove over to Manker Pattern but discovered that
the 6.0 finals were being played at Baylor School, a few miles away.
We arrived around 8:30 and learned that the 6.0 finals would be
played at 9:30AM. Southern
States would play Pacific Northwest to determine first and second place and
Caribbean would play Florida to determine third and fourth place.
The only player I knew in the finals was Holgar Spann
who I had lost to in our first match.
He was paired with a different partner for the finals and they easily
won their match in two sets.
Southern States was initially ahead in their other two matches, but both
games got much closer in the end.
One match ended in a tie-breaker loss after the Southern player made
a shot, fell, dropped his racquet, did a barrel roll, recovered, picked up
his racquet and returned to the court in time to make the next shot.
Two minutes later, Southern clinched the win with a two-set victory
on the final court. Both games
were very exciting. It was
somewhat comforting to know that the only team which had beaten us had gone
on to win the
national title.
After the
match we headed over to The City Diner for brunch.
The weather had cleared a bit so Ying and I decided to drive up to
Lookout Mountain and visit
Ruby Falls and Rock
City, two local tourist attractions.
When we arrived, we elected not to go into Ruby Falls as it would
have taken too long, but we did hike through the chasms of
Rock City and got
some spectacular views of the seven US States which can be seen from the
summit.
Most of
us will fly back to California on Monday.
Ying and I will drive to Nashville for a couple days, and then back
to Atlanta until Friday when we will fly to the Caribbean for a week.
We had planned to stop at the Jack Daniels Distillery en-route to
Nashville, however, it was snowing Monday morning and the tour was mostly
outside so we decided to wait and try and go to Lynchburg on Wednesday when
we returned to Atlanta.
We
arrived in Nashville before noon and checked into the
Opryland Hotel. This was a
particularly good choice as all 2800 rooms surround several large atriums
and we will not have to go outside into the freezing temperatures.
We ate lunch at the Conservatory Café and then wandered around the
hotel for a couple hours before taking a nap in the afternoon.
For dinner we ate at Jack Daniel’s and then returned to watch Argo in
our room.
Tuesday
it was snowing again so we drove next door to the
Opry Mills
Mall where we ate lunch and then watched Oz in 3-D at the IMAX theatre.
After dinner at Wasabi’s Japanese Restaurant, we went to the
Grand Ole Opry where we
saw Greg Bates, Jeannie Seely, Pam Tillis, Lorrie Morgan, Jesse McReynolds
and Dierks Bentley…none
of whom I had ever heard of, but were entertaining.
Wednesday
morning we checked out of Opryland and drove to Atlanta, Georgia.
Along the way, we stopped in Lynchburg, Tennessee to visit the
Jack Daniel
Distillery. The portions of
the distillery that we toured seemed to be built in the woods and were
considerably old. Every single
drop of Jack Daniel’s sold in 140 countries, however, is produced here.
The smell of liquor in the mash house was so strong that we were not
allowed to stop walking and the tour leader told us what was happening there
after we were all safely outside.
At the end of the tour, we had the opportunity to purchase a single
barrel of Jack Daniels for $12,500, but we passed on this as our car was
full. The names of customers who
have purchased full barrels, however, cover three entire walls of the
building. After lunch at a diner
in Lynchburg, we continued the drive to Atlanta, arriving at 6:30PM.
We checked into the
Ritz-Carleton downtown and got something quick to eat before going to
sleep.
Thursday,
March 28th, we drove up to Buckhead to see
Jack Strama, an
old client whom I have not seen in 33 years.
After leaving New Jersey in 1981, Jack moved to Atlanta where he
built several hundred condominiums, an office building and owned a
restaurant. More recently he and
his wife are Realtors with Sotheby’s where they have sold $300 million worth
of homes in the last several years.
We
returned to the hotel and had the concierge give us a ride down to
Centennial Olympic
Park where we spent an hour visiting
The World of
Coca-Cola. We ate lunch at
Legal Seafood and then walked through the park which was humming with
activity as they prepared for the Final Four college basketball tournament
next weekend. Later in the
afternoon we took a VIP tour of the
CNN Studios which
included entrance into some live broadcasting studios and was quite
interesting. We ate dinner at a
local steak restaurant and then went back to the hotel to pack for our
flight to the Caribbean tomorrow. |
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