Club Tennis: What It Adds to the College Experience

By Catherine Frederick on October 31, 2017

There was already some drama in the days before the weekend of the tennis tournament that was to take place the weekend before Halloween. People had sent in their names for a spot in the tournament and a lineup was made, and some people were unhappy with the spots where they’d been placed.

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At every tournament, there are several teams representing a single school. Most tournaments, there are four teams brought along, so we have an A, B, C, and D team. This tournament, however, was our home tournament, and so we had an A team all the way through an F team; two more teams than usual. Obviously, the goal is to be good enough for A, but that’s not always the case.

The lineup is just a judgement on what group of people the club officers thought could play the best together and hopefully end up winning the Gold Bracket, which is usually populated by UF and UM teams.

Some people thought that they were put on teams that weren’t representative of their skills, and it’s entirely possible that that’s true, because there are a lot of players, and it’s sometimes difficult to know the exact level another person plays at.

We’d also had some trouble figuring out who had priority over the FSU courts, the club team or the intermural team. We had a weird number of teams and players showing up, due to Halloween being just around the corner, the box of t-shirts in the home team’s colors that we pass out to all the teams on the second day of the tournament was short about 40 medium sized shirts (the most common size,) and to top it all off, it was supposed to be our coldest weekend yet. So, the tournament started off a little shaky.

Tournaments are supposed to go like this: most players wake up at around 6:30 am, change into tennis clothes with as little awkwardness as possible while sharing a room with three other people (who you might have met for the first time the night before), eat a lackluster breakfast at whatever hotel that could be booked with the limited resources afforded to club teams, and then get to the courts a half hour before the 8 am start time.

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They actually go like this: wake up to an alarm at an ungodly hour, stay in bed for an extra fifteen or more minutes while cursing yourself, stagger into your tennis clothes as you try to share a sink with three other people, realize you need to be at the courts (anywhere from 5-20 minutes away) in 15 minutes, sprint to the breakfast at your hotel, grab a banana or apple if there is one, figure out whose car you’re going to fit in, maybe force them to drive through Dunkin’ Donuts, try to figure out parking at an unfamiliar college campus, wonder why anyone would choose to go to this school when they could be going to your clearly superior school, and arrive at the tennis facilities within 5-10 minutes of the 8 am start time, only to actually start playing anywhere from a half hour to an hour later.

On top of that, it was 42 degrees this weekend, and every other team that drove up was from a school at least 2 hours south of us.

You would expect the story to go downhill from here, but it doesn’t. By all logic, it should. FSU and UF sharing courts? Add FAU, USF, FGCU, and a bunch of other should-be rivals, and you’d really expect some kind of injuries to be happening fairly regularly.

But here’s the thing, no one cares about the rivalries. We see these people a couple times a month. Some of us have been playing each other for years, at this point. Instead of bitter enmity, FSU and UF players trade jokes back and forth. In between matches, the teams mingle in between the courts, asking after people who have graduated and finding out about their summers.

There’s still a healthy amount of competition. Everyone likes to win, after all. But there’s frustration at the most, and rarely ever anger. The people who threw tantrums during matches in high school either lose those tendencies or never fully integrate into the club. When players are rude and reflect poorly upon the school they represent, they often find themselves restricted from travelling or suspended from the team.

College is stressful. There isn’t room to add to that. The tennis club is where people go to get away from the stress and forget about it for a few hours. No matter the ridiculously early hours or the fact that it’s so cold out that people are wearing blankets outside in Florida of all places, people continue to sign up for these tournaments, and they continue to come together and interact with one another.

If people aren’t wearing their team colors, you can’t even tell what school they came from unless you knew already. And at the end of the tournament, you go to a box full of t-shirts, and you leave to go back to your school, gladly wearing the colors of another team.

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