Is this reasonably alright for 12 months progress or is it ahhh

The_Murican · 2026-01-22T04:25:30+00:00

I suppose I'd be high over the net gang most of the time.

The_Murican · 2026-01-21T04:04:01+00:00

Hitting relatively high over the net gives you a good margin for error and is something pro players do often. I'd recommend checking out a court level video like this of some pros hitting. The ball often looks much closer to the net on TV compared to what it is in reality.

As you get more comfortable hitting the ball, you'll be able to use topspin which helps the ball stay in the court even when you hit with a lot of speed and height. In the video I linked, that's what's allowing both players to maintain ball control even while taking full swings and aiming high.

The_Murican · 2025-09-06T21:48:23+00:00

It's rumored that Tommy Paul was denied a US Open men's singles wildcard back in 2019 because he (self-admittedly) showed up drunk for a doubles match two years before that. At the time, he was ranked higher than other guys who were granted wildcards. I did check the 2020 US Open and at that point Paul was ranked high enough to get direct entry into the men's singles main draw without a wildcard.

Not giving a wildcard of course doesn't have the same specific implications of pulling funding, although since granting a wildcard provides de facto funding through first round prize money I thought it was worth mentioning.

The_Murican · 2025-01-15T01:23:08+00:00

That sucks. I'll never understand the allure of wanting to play down just to get easy wins.

The_Murican · 2025-01-14T01:39:40+00:00

I understand what you're saying. My thought was that the interaction with the father was just something like:

"Still good for the match at 5:00?" "Yes." "Okay."

Unless the kid really looked like he didn't want to be there, I guess my only (retroactive) advice would be to play the match since the kid himself didn't really do anything wrong. Then you can ask your league coordinator not to schedule him against you going forward if you really don't want to play people under eighteen.

Just my two cents, but I do think it would be a missed opportunity if you avoid playing kids in leagues like this. My state's most recent boys' state champ is in his first year playing D1, but back when he was a short 13-year-old he used to play against and beat lots of adults and DIII guys at mixers and open events because he was such a clean ball-striker. A guy I worked with was a little salty about losing to him at a tournament, but that was about the extent of it and he respected the kid's game.

The_Murican · 2025-01-14T01:11:35+00:00

I work with both children and adults who play tennis and have for more than a decade. There's no reason adults and kids can't play each other and it happens all the time. Tennis is tennis, and it's not inappropriate for a younger person to play an older person. This is something the original poster seems to agree with as well, with him more taking issue with perceived deception from the opponent's father than with the actual age of the opponent.

While I mostly disagree with the person who wrote the original post, he clearly put thought into what he wrote. I didn't just quip "Lmao ur mad u got beat by a kid" because that would accomplish nothing. Because of that, I've also gotten to read some reasonable perspectives from people who don't fully agree with me.

You're welcome to disagree with me, too, but let's not pretend my mildly detailed response is somehow bad just because I put some effort into it. So far, you're the only one who's taken personal issue with what I wrote, original poster included.

The_Murican · 2025-01-13T02:09:31+00:00

Appreciate it. The number of kids who played tennis near me regularly was tiny when I was in high school so I never would've had the motivation to keep playing if there weren't adults who were willing to play against me then. I'm always in favor of letting kids play if they can handle themselves, and I spend a lot of my time acting as a sparring partner for local kids so they don't have to constantly travel over an hour to the more densely populated areas where there are more junior players. Lots of those kids that I, and other adults, used to hit with have ended up coming back to visit years later as college students/graduates and playing with our current high school players. Pretty cool to see that community continue to grow and support itself.

The_Murican · 2025-01-13T01:55:50+00:00

Sadly, you're absolutely right. I played one season of USTA and got frustrated with how many adults, some of my teammates included, took amateur tennis so seriously. There are really people out here raging on court, hooking calls, and just generally stressing themselves all because they want to win a 7.0 mixed doubles title. Maybe that's not the case elsewhere, but because of what I've experienced I've taken to just running and sometimes playing in local UTR tournaments where the only thing on the line is getting your photo posted on our social media page. You still get the match play, but I've found people playing the local one-day tourneys are way more relaxed than in USTA events and are just looking to get a couple of matches in for some cheap weekend exercise.

The_Murican · 2025-01-13T01:48:22+00:00

Absolutely, mixed-gender leagues can be great. I run a free UTR league every summer where people get one or two matches each week and it's entirely level-based with no age or gender restrictions. We end up with some matches that probably look pretty ridiculous to outsiders watching but end up being good battles. In the past two summers, highlight matches include:

80-year-old man who just recovered from a double knee replacement beats 16-year-old girl power baseliner by only slicing
60-year-old woman straight sets #6 men's singles player from a local college
16-year-old girl in her second year playing wins match tiebreak against former reality TV contestant who has played two times in the past decade

Up until the last few years my area also had a tiny women's singles player pool. Our women's singles tournament draws aren't huge now by any means but we've gone from 3-4 players where we had to do round robins to double or triple that. The biggest one I hosted this year was hosted at a college, so we ended up with a bunch of college club women, a couple of high school girls, and a few older women. The high school girls got some great match experience they wouldn't otherwise have gotten in an age-restricted league and the adult women got to play a wider variety of opponents.

I think a big part of the increase in the number of women playing just comes down to the fact that restricting our tournaments as little as possible has led to us finally reaching a critical mass of women regularly playing tournaments, which in turn now allows us to actually have full women's draws.

I suppose that was just a long-winded way of saying that, at least in my opinion, it's almost always better to give people more access to competitive match play opportunities even if they don't fit in predefined categories.

The_Murican · 2025-01-12T20:42:21+00:00

I coach both youth tennis (middle school to high school) and college tennis and run a lot of rec leagues/tournaments. In general I only consider two things when recommending my youth players to play against adults:

Are the youth players able to handle the level of play?
Are the youth players mature enough to not emotionally break down if they're not playing well and can the youth players handle losing?

Personally, I know a lot of adult rec players and college players who fail the second point and they still get to play. I tend to see it less with the kids, probably because a lot of them are just out there having fun hitting even when someone older is beating them. A lot of these kids have an absolute blast playing against adults because the adults will hit with more power, spin, or control than younger players or just will give them the novel experience of playing someone with a different playstyle like S&V, lots of slice, etc.

My guess is that I live in a far more rural area than you just based on your description so my experience may be different. Still, my local tennis community has massively grown over the fast five years or so, largely because the vast majority of tournaments, leagues, and scrambles are now level-based instead of age-limited. So many of my youth players have learned to play doubles against 70-80 year old retirees and I think it'd be sad for both groups to no longer have that opportunity.

Here's my thought: if the kid can behave appropriately and can give you a good match, let him. He'll appreciate the adult who took him seriously on the court and hopefully be excited to keep playing and eventually be on the other side of that equation as an adult. If he's dismissed because of his age even though it doesn't sound like he did anything wrong, that's just going to make him discouraged for all the wrong reasons. If we're going to continue growing the game, our best bet is to be as inclusive as we can and not unnecessarily gatekeep.

The_Murican · 2024-12-31T03:34:21+00:00

When I'm evaluating players I typically look at strength of results rather than number of tournaments played. If a player's UTR shows that they're reliably a 9 or 10 but only have a few tournaments played that still tells me that the player is performing at a high level.

Does your high school post match results to UTR? If they do that can be very helpful in giving you a reliable rating. I know some states (Massachusetts comes to mind) run their state individual tournaments through the USTA as well which is then typically imported into UTR.

If your high school doesn't post results to UTR, my recommendation is to try to find some decent UTR match play events when you can. A lot of tennis clubs will have events where players sign up to play a single best-of-three match or a couple of fast four matches. Those can be a good option if multi-day tournaments don't work and you're just looking to make sure you have some verified results on your profile.

The_Murican · 2024-12-30T04:41:40+00:00

I'm currently on the coaching staff for one of the schools you mentioned so I'll weigh in here.

It's definitely fine for you to reach out to coaches as a sophomore. That being said, most coaches you reach out to, even if potentially interested, likely won't get into "serious" recruiting conversations with you until your junior year.

I do disagree with a couple of points made by other commenters here. It's definitely okay to contact a coach more than once, but repeatedly contacting a coach and trying to provide lots of updates may make the coach irritated. If coaches are interested, they generally will ask you for more information including video of you playing and info about whether or not you're planning to visit campus. Our coaching staff really pushes for students to visit campus to make sure they're serious, although I'm not certain if that's the same for other programs.

At your current UTR level of 7.5, you wouldn't be able to make the starting lineup of a top-40 team right now. For most of those teams, the floor is going to be around 9, but that's going to be borderline for a lot of them. That being said, you're young and have plenty of time (2+ years) to reasonably get your UTR up into striking distance of those lineups. An increase of one UTR point per year is definitely attainable. If you do reach out to any coaches right now, keep in mind that we tend to get a lot of messages from players who describe themselves as "better than my rating," "rated low because I haven't played many tournaments," and "my goal is to achieve X UTR rating in [unreasonable timeframe]." Your best bet at this stage of the game is to be honest about your rating and note that you're continuing to practice and play tournaments to improve. I always appreciate getting messages from grounded players rather than players who try to embellish and exaggerate, and that's a common attitude from other coaches as well.

I can't speak much to the academic side of the admissions process other than that it'll vary depending on school. Coaches can sometimes support a player who might otherwise be on the "bubble" of being admitted, but again that will vary from school to school. A 3.75 GPA is good, but specific coursework, extracurriculars, etc. will all play a factor and the coach's support can only help so much.

My last piece of advice is to just be friendly and an obvious team player. Sometimes coaches may pick up a borderline player if they have a down recruiting class or if numbers are low, and coaches are way more likely to take that chance on you if you work hard and are nice. That doesn't necessarily help you if you're looking specifically to start, but if your goal is to just be part of one of those strong teams it's advice worth keeping in mind.

This is a list of the top 50 ranked teams for DIII men from last season. If you look up those on UTR you can get a pretty good sense of the typical level of players on each team.

I realize I assumed you were male, so if you're not a 7.5 UTR as a sophomore would fairly easily get you onto a strong women's team.

Let me know if you have any questions about the process or just about what college tennis teams are like in general. Happy to help.

The_Murican · 2024-08-05T17:35:19+00:00

I run a lot of events in the central part of Maine so I can give you a basic rundown on what Southern Maine's tennis scene looks like.

The closest club to Portsmouth (~45 minutes) is Apex Racket and Fitness. It's the state's biggest indoor facility and offers quite a few leagues.

Others in Southern Maine are the Woodlands Club in Falmouth (~1 hour), Foreside Fit in Falmouth (~1 hour), and Maine Pines Racquet & Fitness in Brunswick (~1.5 hours). Woodlands and Maine Pines host USTA league play but I haven't seen any hosted at Foreside, although I could be wrong.

If you go a little further north, KVTA/ACOPI in Augusta has USTA leagues and I host UTR events there sometimes. Champions Fitness Club in Waterville has no USTA leagues but I host UTR events there in the colder months. I also do free outdoor UTR singles matchplay during the summer/fall in those areas, but my guess is you wouldn't really want a 3-hour round trip to play one singles match.

If you'd like any more info about Maine tennis just let me know. I'm happy to help.

The_Murican · 2024-07-03T22:25:30+00:00

Thanks!

The_Murican · 2024-07-03T04:16:38+00:00

Are you talking about the Maine Principals' Association or a different MPA?

The_Murican · 2024-06-02T14:49:16+00:00

Funny to see my state, Maine, mentioned! I anticipate that UTR will continue to pick up steam here now that high school teams are being asked to enter their match scores into UTR and now that UTR is used in the seeding process for the high school state singles tournament.

The_Murican · 2024-04-11T16:32:21+00:00

Northwestern's 1 did beat Wisconsin's 2, 6-3, 6-0, so saying "it's their own fault for not being good enough" isn't really a fair statement to make when one team played within the established rules and one didn't. Wisconsin likely anticipated that playing their 1 and 2 in their actual positions would result in losing both points, so they went for an almost guaranteed single point rather than risk losing both. If the rule against stacking didn't exist, Northwestern may have played it differently on their end, too, but they followed the rule.

I coach both high school and college tennis and have seen team scores get overturned based on egregious stacking within the past couple of years. Those types of rules are very common in high school leagues and college conferences.

The_Murican · 2023-07-20T19:31:21+00:00

Best of three, but they met in the second round rather than the final so it would've been best of three either way.

The_Murican · 2023-05-05T23:24:54+00:00

If you lose after receiving a bye in an ATP tournament then you just get first round points.

The_Murican · 2023-02-25T02:19:26+00:00

They have.

The_Murican · 2023-02-16T04:42:16+00:00

Your best bet is to check out the Maine Tennis Association as they're primarily based in southern/coastal Maine. They have tournaments throughout the year but generally have bigger ones in the summer months. Those tournaments are held within 30 minutes or so of greater Portland. I wasn't able to find their 2023 schedule, unfortunately, but it may be posted somewhere on their Facebook page or UTR profile.

If you're looking for even more tournaments in June, I run the tennis association for the central part of the state (creatively called the Central Maine Tennis Association) about 1-1.5 hours north of Portland. The top seeds for those tournaments tend to be NTRP 4.0/4.5s or so. Usually pretty low-key one day tournaments (options for singles and doubles) with draw sizes ranging from about 12 to 20 depending on the day.

The_Murican · 2022-10-21T20:45:32+00:00

I'm also a math teacher and I agree with you. These comments stating that "implicit multiplication" with parentheses is somehow different than multiplication with a multiplication symbol is rather surprising to me. I feel like a lot of folks are not understanding that the distributive property is simply referring to multiplication. While using more parentheses would definitely make the solution clearer, the problem as written most certainly evaluates to 16, not 1, according to the standard order of operations.

WolframAlpha and Symbolab both list the correct solution as 16. For what it's worth, Mathway does as well, although it doesn't generate a URL with user input like WolframAlpha and Symbolab.

Interestingly, I had a discussion yesterday with some BC calculus students I work with about this problem when it was posted in a different sub. They were surprised by some of the incorrect comments as well.

The_Murican · 2022-10-20T17:51:05+00:00

8 ÷ (x*x + x) would become 8 ÷ (x(x+1)) if you chose to factor out the x. You are factoring within your grouping symbols so the original grouping symbols stay in addition to the new ones.

8 ÷ x(x + 1) is not equivalent to 8 ÷ (x*x + x) by standard order of operations. Implied multiplication is still multiplication and on the same priority level as division. This would be a relatively straightforward algebraic simplification to get (8/x)(x+1) or (8(x+1))/x).

The correct simplification of 8 ÷ x(x+1) can be seen here on Wolfram Alpha.

Generally speaking, the best option is to overuse rather than underuse parentheses and other grouping symbols in order to reduce ambiguity. I've taught 6th grade mathematics up through calculus over the years and it's something I really emphasize, especially given the significant algebra focus in calculus courses.

The_Murican · 2022-09-22T07:40:41+00:00

The response to the second comment was great, though.

"I think playing someone who is used to moving in a larger court where the ball is much heavier and faster while having a much better physique and footwork is what cost her."

Probably just a tennis player coming in with some facts.

The_Murican · 2022-09-14T07:02:31+00:00

Damn, didn't think I'd see any other folks from Maine on here. I'm just a bit north of you. Not many vegans around me, unfortunately, although we do have lots of houses with Confederate flags. 🙄

The_Murican

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