Kate on the Fourth
"Dear ...(Newspage): We haven't had a new page for ever so long and we'd really appreciate it if we could stop worrying about where our names are in the alphabet and whether to bring soup or salad. Please help."
-Nature Girl
Oops. Okay, here we go:
"When the sun is out, these courts must be the busiest courts in New England."
-A Member
"As all the world is cheered by the sun,"
-Gloucester
Act 1, Scene 2
King Richard III
Is it summer yet? Seems like maybe. It's hot. The club is packed.
The weather has turned a bit and the courts are too dry and dusty, but fear not, the staff is patching the courts and dousing them liberally with calcium chloride. You'll see a court a day blocked off for 'Maintenance.' A whole day is needed for the new clay and calcium chloride to set up, to firm up, then the dustiness and imperfections and distractions from the dead-on accuracy of all our shots will be gone a-way.
The club's Outreach Program is in full swing. Five days a week, from 12:30 to 2:00, kids from city camps come to the club to learn to play tennis and drink our wondrous lemonade. Our pros are dauntless and patient and good.
We had a goodly turn-out for the Fourth:
| The next Round Robin will take place on Thursday, July 23. The meal will be catered. Tennis starts at 6:00. What fun. |
And we might take note of the Rogers Cup in Montreal (Aug. 8-16)
We are going to try out a new feature on the newspage. Let's call it The Book Blurb. The Blurb will note books not necessarily about tennis, but authored by CTC members. So, if you members have recently, or maybe not so recently, written a book that you'd like blurbed, please let us know.
Let's start with:
While We Were Sleeping by David Hemenway.
"This book powerfully illuminates how public health works with more than sixty success stories drawn from the area of injury and violence prevention."
The Parents We Mean To Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development by Rick Weissbourd.
The New Yorker review said, "In this ardent and persuasive inquiry, Weissbourd, a Harvard psychologist, warns that 'happiness-besotted' parents do children a disservice by emphasizing personal fulfillment over empathy."
Inside Urban Charter Schools: Promising Practices and Strategies in Five High-Performing Schools by Kay Merseth "an inspirational and practical how-to guide for school reformers."
"Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second."
-Don DeLlllo
Underworld
Let's talk about reservations. Let's talk about 8:00, the gunshot that starts the blitzing hour.
We don't have the banks of friendly operators waiting to take your call. We don't have the cesium clock. We have two lines on one phone that, when the hour strikes, is too hot to handle. It burns; it cooks the ear.
Folks want to complain that they called right at 8:00, right on the hour, and their court was already booked. Well, if 10 people call right on the hour, some caller is going to be first, some caller second, and so on.
Let's laugh a little bit here, shall we? One joker dials all the numbers but one and then on the stroke of the hour, hits the last digit. Another dials 30 seconds early and works the answering machine, chatting about the accuracy of his clocks and how eager he is to play until the hour strikes and the staff member picks up the phone. (We are thwarting this joker by turning off the answering machine at 7:55.) We have folks who set their cell phone alarms and speed dial from court 2. We have jokers with automatic continuous re-dial, jokers with secretaries, jokers with tricks, strategies, pleadings, scoldings, tantrums, vituperations.
No one has ever tried a bribe.
The club directory for 2009 should always be at your hand or in your hand. Other than membership listings, all of the information in the book is available on the website.
Some useful links:
Here's a link to the espn site, with pro ranking.
And a club member (let's call him Sol) suggested a link to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I. The site is rich.
We still have the tournament draws (from 2001 to 2004) available on-line (including all of the results), thanks to the Java Kid. We are re-locating the links, however.
"On the court, tennis players exchange not only ground strokes but lots of information. It's a richly interactive sport, both verbally and non-verbally. If players communicate clearly, simply, and consistently, the game will proceed more quickly, and with less fuss and misunderstanding. Here are a few guidelines that can make the game more fun, friendly, and fair for all...."
We've had some requests to run Craig Lambert's piece, sampled above, on Tennis Communication. (We'd better leave this link up on the newspage permanently.)
Take a look
The Yearbook link will take you to the last newspage from 2008. From there you can see the whole of the Persistent Archive of last year's news.
Website Note: The time and temperature icon below is a link to a Boston weather site.
Joe DeBassio, Webmaster.
Website Note II: The honey-comb icon is also a link. It takes the clicker to an archive of all the past news pages so that said clicker can read the news pages for the whole year (2009). The less-than link (<) next to the honeycomb icon will take clickers to the previous issue of this year's newspage.
This version is archived at: https://www.cambridgetennisclub.com/News/News2009.13.en.html
