Maureen, our Membership Chair, is back. And we are very glad to see her.
And how was Paris, Maureen?
The pattern seems to be: quiet here on the weekend, sometimes very quiet, but busy during the week, especially Fridays and most especially prime times. We note the almost absolute absence of summer members and new members.
An Ode to Summer Members and New Members
Oh summer members,
Oh new members,
Come play.
A Whine
For many years the club had an old cannon of a ball machine. The machine was cast iron, a black low-slung, open-topped box with a tube. It weighed 4 tons. You poured the balls into the box and things whirred and clanked and balls came blamming out. You could raise or lower the tube. People used the machine, say, 3 or 4 hours a week. Members were not charged to use the machine.
Maybe 10 years ago, the club bought a spiffing new machine, green, light weight, aluminum frame, with some nifty features: oscillation, ball-speed, and height controls. The club decided to charge a fee for its use in order to pay for the machine. The members who organised the machine's purchase used it a lot and pretty much paid for it themselves. The machine was used, say, 6-8 hours a week. (We have no stats. This whine (and we suspect all whines) is anecdotal.)
Clay courts are tough on ball machines: the clay clogs the gears. The 'new' machine started having problems. Last year the machine became very erratic. (Three balls would blam out at you, bangbangbang, then there would be a pause, beat, beat, beat, then a ball would plop out, then bangbangbang. Late in the year, people gave up on it and pressured, er, asked the club to buy a new machine.
This Spring, the club bought a Tennis Tower, a plastic machine with millions of features: oscillation, feed frequency, height, spin, speed, etc. The machine has many features and many problems. Today, it sits in the clubhouse amidst a pool of tools: Billy is working on it.
The Whine: while the other machines were up and running, they were used, max,10 hours a week: now that we have a new, pricey, laser-guided, fabuloso machine that doesn't work, 50 people a week are looking for it, no, 80 people a week. People who haven't played here in 10 years are looking to hit with a ball machine. Folks are going to have nose bleeds if they can't use the machine, and use it today. The phone rings and rings: is the machine working? No? Oh nooooo. When will it be fixed? I really.... People who don't even play tennis are going to get racquets and start to play just so they can use the machine. Isn't it a new machine? Isn't it under warrantee? Can't it be replaced? Can't it be replaced by 3:00 today? I would so love to use it...
| The next round robin will take place on Thursday, August 4. Tennis starts at 6:00 p.m. The meal will be pizza exquisito. |
Rick Rose has been mighty busy. His doubles strategy clinics (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:00 to 11:30) have been howling successes. The kids clinics on Sunday afternoons have also been busy.
Take a look
The club book, right now, should be right by your hand. The website also has up-to-date info. The Rules section, the Governors and Committees and Activities (tournaments, round robins, etc) sections are current for 2005. Also, the Waiting List (which is not featured in the book) is current and ordered on the website. (The Waiting List and the list of New Members can be accessed through the FAQ page.) We thank the committee heads for making the information available in such a timely fashion and we urge all public spirited readers to proof-read.
'Members', and' Reservation Requests' are not active parts of the site nowadays. 'Timelines' is for adepts.
We'll keep the tournament draws available on-line (including all of the results), thanks to the Java Kid:
And the previous tournaments:
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Tournaments |
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And here's the saga of 2002's tournaments (so's we can compare and contrast):
And the saga of the year before (we're mighty fancy here, and mighty grateful to the Java Kid for doing all this work):
Phew.
Some useful links:
Here's a link to the espn site, with pro ranking.
And a club member (let's call him Sol) suggests a link to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I. The site is rich.
The Yearbook link will take you to the last newspage from 2004. From there you can see the whole of the Persistant 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 you can read the news pages for the whole year (2004). The less-than link (<) next to the honeycomb icon will take you to the last issue of the newspage.
