"A sure-fire way to toe the trig when serving."
-Tennis Tigress
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
-Lord Byron
Rick Rose, the club pro, is out of commission. He just had his appendix removed. (He had thought that the problem was the shrimp he had eaten the night before.) Get well soon, Rick. We need you.
Rick's clinics, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, will be taught by the club's assistant pro, Keith Warner. Keith will also teach some of Rick's lessons. Please check in at the club.
Darkness falls. on the back courts at about 7:45 nowadays, so the 7:00 reservations are mostly limited to the front courts. Now you might think that the onslaught of earlier darkness would fill folks with, say, melancholy or intimations of mortality, but no, they call at 8:00, fiercely and aggressively and sometimes rudely and petulantly, to reserve the front courts. You might think that the staff would wither under all the fierceness, aggression, rudeness and petulance, but no, they find it
Court reservations: advance reservations begin at exactly 8:00 a.m. The club clock has been triangulated with the Cartesian Grid Clock in Blicero, Switzerland, the Great Guapo Quantum Clock atop Mt. Gangrine, and Jeff's cell-phone. You can come close to our perfection by checking your clock against the telephone time at 617 637-1234. While we feel great sympathy for folks without access to the Great Cartesian blahblah, we do not accept calls at, for instance, 7:59.32, no matter what your clock says.
"Way harsh, dude."
-Bill and Ted
| The next round robin will take place on Thursday, September 1. Tennis starts at 6:00 p.m. The meal will be catered. |
Folks from the Cambridge Chronicle visited a while back and published an article about the kid's camps here at the club:
RAINBOW CAMPERS GET SERVED
Local club coaches to special needs youngsters
By Jessica Smith, CORRESPONDENT
"For six weeks this summer, cheering can be heard at the intersection of Willard and Mt. Auburn Streets. Between shouts of "Get it" and "You can do it," special needs kids are learning tennis for free at the Cambridge Tennis Club.
Four days a week, the club hosts 15 teenagers who enjoy 90 minutes of tennis instruction with pros Rick Rose and Keith Warner. Racquets and court time are supplied by the club. The staff is paid with donations from members in memory of long-time member and Cantabrigian David Haskell.
"It celebrates diversity; the kids have fun hitting the ball and being around here," said Warner, as children approached him and Rose for hugs and high-fives.
Darryl Bullock brings kids to the club form Cambridge-based Camp Rainbow, where he is an assistant director. "It takes a lot of patience to work with kids like this in a specific sport. Rick is just really good with these kids. They love this," Bullock said, watching his campers line up to be tossed neon-green balls on two of the club's clay courts.
On especially hot days, the kids take short breaks for lemonade on the club's patio, where they chat with their counselors and the pros. At the session's end, Rose's offer to spray the kids with water was met with more cheers as he let kids frolic in the cool mist.
The kids aren't the only ones who delight in the program. Murray Wheeler, a club member, said, "The tennis club really likes that we're doing this."
The club featured real Gatorade for a couple of days last week. Lemonade or real Gatorade? we asked. And you answered:
"I prefer the lemonade: it's more natural." (A kid said this. A Cambridge kid, of course.)
"Eloctrolytes? We don't need no stinkin' electrolytes."
"It looks like a urine sample."
"It looks like &$#@."
"It tastes like &$#@."
"-It's so much easier for the staff to deal with."
"-But that's not really the point, is it?"
So...lemonade.
"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. Bettern't we?)
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.
