2009
"Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel:
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there;
Sap cheque'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness every where:
Then, were not summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distill'd though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet."
Sonnet 5
The club opened this year on April 25 and closed on November 11. The season lasted 200 days. Rain closed us down on 197 of those days. The 3 days that we were open were unseasonably cold. Nobody made a shot.
Nawww...
We had a BIG SEASON.
Even though we had lots of rainy days, we only had a few days when all of the courts were closed for the day. (Right. We were only closed on the days when I wanted to play.) We played and partied and carried on. And some of us made some of our shots.
We had tournaments, lots of tournaments with lots of, er, action. (Death match tennis, anyone?) Some great play. We had good new players who asserted themselves. We had long-time members who had a baby instead of winning any of our lesser tournaments.
We had an indefatigable President, Len Singer.
We had the Great Email Flame Wars of '09. (See: Wikipedia.)
We thank Nick Trautz who, even though he was and is buried under a Tibetan mountain of school work, was here to help when we needed him most. We hope that Nick survives Harvard Divinity School and comes back to work and play here a lot next season.
The staff had terabytes of work this year, dealing with always wet courts and 10,000,000 phone calls. The staff certainly answered The Call of Duty.
In case you haven't noticed, the building was painted this year, the front hall ceiling was re-done, and the outside lights were fixed. Let us offer thanks to Annette Lamond at the Cambridge Skating Club for her efforts to beautify the club.
We offer our thanks to all of the other folks who made the season cheery and functional. Thanks to Bob Doyle who supports and guides the newsroom staff on many issues, technical, philosophical, political, filmical.
We offer thanks to contributors to the newspage, especially Ken Turnbull, Kendall Hoffman, and Karl Klaussen for photos used on the newspage.
The website stays on through the winter. All the links stay awake, alert, waiting for a click.
The club will open next season somewhere around the third week in April, we hope. When we have some news, in the Spring, the newspage will pop awake and post it.
Let's survive the winter and meet here again in the spring.
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:
Hot off the presses, a new book by Faith Moore, Celebrating a Life, Planning Memorial Services and Other Creative Remembrances. "Celebrating a Life" provides the ideas, inspiration, and how-to advice needed for creating a meaningful memorial service. Light-hearted but sensitive, this thoughtful guide covers it all."
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."
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.)
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/News2009.24.en.html
