Sometimes, the work you do doesn't reflect in tangible benchmarks. You're not paid what you think you should be. You've still not lost those pesky 10 pounds. You studied hard for that test and you didn't get 100.
I had been feeling pretty good about my game towards the end of last year. I won a doubles tournament with a good friend and was playing better league tennis. I wasn't always winning, but I was thinking through situations on court a lot better and it turned sets that could have been 1-6 into 5-7. No, not victory, but progress. That's good effort that can be built upon, so it's worth it. Right?
OK, sure. But sometimes, you do want to know what those tangible benefits are, and it can be difficult with USTA league play. Going from the league website alone, you can only guess how your rating is looking. But there is this other tool. Someone at the courts told me a while back about this website you can use to get a more specific rating, but when I tried to use it, I didn't get a rating because I was only playing mixed doubles, or something like that. But I knew other people who visited TennisRecord.com and were able to get a better read on their ratings.
(If you're a tennis player and you clicked that link, I'll wait. I know you just checked yourself, the person you played last week, your first doubles partner, your rival in that one tournament. Just enjoy it. There's a lot there -- win/loss streaks, how often you've been bageled -- just have a ball.)
Anyway, at the beginning of the year, when I was (still) making resolutions, I was puzzling over my tennis goals. Last year, my goal was to win at least 50 percent of my matches, and when I went back to the USTA site, I realized I'd missed it, going 7-10 for the season. But I definitely ended the year stronger than I started it, so I felt good about myself and decided to set my goal for 60 percent.
Then it occurred to me to check TennisRecord, just for giggles. I was pleasantly surprised for a moment to realize that my results were now registering a rating on the site. Then I realized what I was looking at.
I was barely a 3.5? What the what. Here I was, if I'm being honest, living in some delusion that my improving results were moving the needle for me and that maybe one day, I'd return to being a 4.0. I felt like that was going to happen soon. Meanwhile, if this site was right, I was a couple blowouts away from being a 3.0!
I don't know about you, but nothing motivates me like a visual. I realized it wasn't enough to aim for winning a slight majority of my matches. I needed to run the tables if I wanted out of the red. But the thing you don't want to do is think about running the tables.
Because then you start swinging and hitting the fences on your second return of the game. You toss in some double faults. Your feet are basically rooted to the ground as you refuse to get into a hitting position. Not me, you understand, but in general. Of course.
When I made this discovery, league play was just beginning, and again, despite the rating, I felt good about my game. Then I played my first match against a familiar opponent, one who had beaten the everlovin' crap out of me in the previous season. At first, I bemoaned my fate -- I just wanted one easy win to get under my belt. Was that so much to ask?
My request for a different opponent went unheeded, so I had to get out there anyway. And much like our previous matches, it was tight, with long points and multiple-deuce games. In this match, I was feeling that familiar tightness and I told myself not to go for any crazy shots and to focus on keeping the ball in the court and as deep as possible. Crazily, it worked and I won the set in a tiebreak. The second set was easier and just like that, I'd avenged a loss -- something I hadn't done in a long time. I played it off pretty cool after the match, but I screamed like a 14-year-old girl in a Harry Styles concert when I got in my car.
The next match, I lost, but in a tiebreak. Late errors dogged me again and my opponent's serve got nearly unreturnable towards the end, but I was getting better at using my defensive skills to wear my opponents down a bit. This came in super handy in the next match I played. I lost the first set 6-4 to this younger player with possibly the weirdest serve motion I've ever seen, and then ran out to a big lead in the second set. At some point during this match, I realized that the most consistent thing about my game is my speed and that I should use it. I began to chase down more of her shots and making her hit one more shot. I decided in the moment that I was a wall and that nothing was getting past me.
On the changeover, my opponent looked at me and said, "I'm trying to figure out if we're the same age."
Me: "Hm."
Her: "What year were you born?"
Me: tells her
Her: "What? Oh my goodness!"
Because I was older than her. And I wasn't tired yet. But she was. I won the second set and won a rather uncomplicated tiebreak.
And it was this match that made me think I might be turning a corner. I was not having meltdowns late in matches, it seemed. In fact, I was starting to win games that I normally would have lost due to frustration. Often, I'd get down 0-30 or 0-40 on serve games and start getting negative. I don't want to sound woo-woo, but I think my meditation practice really helps here. At that low point, I've been able to stop and breathe and regroup. I recently had a match outside of league tennis where I was down on my opponent's serve 0-40 and turned it around to win it deep in the first set.
It's not that I don't get nervous or frustrated anymore, but I took those feelings, and instead of pretending they weren't there, I acknowledged them and determined to breathe through it as best I could.
So yeah, maybe a little woo-woo. I'm also still losing some matches, including one last Thursday that I am still angry about. Overall, though, this next level seems to be here to stay. Wanna see another visual?
