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Doug Eng, TAH Director of Adult Tennis Programs
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We hope you are having a good winter! Whether you are playing tennis or not, we'd love to have your company at The Tennis Academy at Harvard again this summer!
We are bringing back the very popular Cardio Tennis Workout in the early evening. It's a great bargain if you go for the seasonal pass! Drill to music and play tennis afterwards!
We are also starting a Beginner Cardio Tennis program. There will be a couple days on weekends where beginners can learn tennis to music and get a great workout. It is a very affordable program and we hope you and your friends can join. We also have our Dartfish lesson program where you get filmed and analyzed using high tech software which the US Olympic teams use.
Hope to see you in the summer!
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Bonnie's Corner with Bonnie Masland, Ph.D. TAH's Senior Associate Director Friends? Foes? Good Sports!!!
As you talk with your children about camp and playing tennis this coming summer and we get ready to welcome them, I was so struck by the theme of the United States Olympic Committee’s 2007 education program which focused on sportsmanship that I had to write this article. In concert with the outstanding sportsmanship displayed by Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal during the Australian Open two weekends ago, I thought we should look at some of the USOC’s suggestions for good sportsmanship: ¤ Hugging or shaking hands with a competitor after a competition ¤ Showing appreciation for those who support you ¤ Acknowledging a competitor’s skills to others ¤ Assisting a competitor in need ¤ Accepting praise with grace and humility ¤ Avoiding any opportunity to criticize competitors or judges
The function of a sport, in addition to providing fun and recreation, is to develop character, helping us to become better individuals capable of working together for the betterment of everyone. The word “compete” means to strive or seek together. At some level, we all know that one person or team will lose and one will win. Healthy management of this interplay is the quintessence of good sportsmanship.
The rules of engagement for Campus Showdowns are simple: there are no referees and you have the right to overrule an opponent’s call if it was obviously a mistake, hence the humorous tag line: ‘only if you are willing to bet your life on it.’ This engenders good sportsmanship in trusting that your opponent can make a mistake and you can overrule the call. Each player has the power to overrule, but they must use it judiciously in order for play to continue.
This process has worked really well in the Campus Showdown events and is an ideal test of character and integrity…the essence of sportsmanship.
p.s.—Dave Fish, Harvard's Varsity Men's Tennis coach, would like you to pass this article on to your high school coaches as a new way to handle intra-squad competition.
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Showdown! Dave Fish
Head Coach of Men’s Tennis
Harvard You may not realize it, but, unlike the team sports that have officials to catch “fouls” or otherwise call penalties, the remarkable feature of most tennis matches is that participants call their own lines. This makes tennis an ideal sport for character-building…one call at a time! You may have read in Bonnie’s Corner above about the interesting method of settling line call disputes in the Campus Showdowns, the events co-hosted by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) and the US Tennis Association (USTA), designed to give junior players more competition locally with collegiate players. To any coach reading this: try it! You’ll never go back. If you are a player on a high school team, print this right now and take it to your coach. Use it in your intra-squad challenges matches! Now that has been adopted nation-wide for Campus Showdowns, it's high time we started exposing high school players to it! The elegance of this approach is that it permits one’s opponent to overrule a line call. By putting the twin rudders of trust and control in the hands of both players, we give players a new tool for navigating through what might otherwise be a difficult competitive situation—like, for instance, a high school challenge match. The condition under which an overrule is permitted is intentionally meant to be so extreme that it is seldom invoked, hence the tag line: to make an overrule, you must “be willing to bet your life on it!” Both players know that the control that each has to overrule must always be tempered by the fact that one’s opponent can do the same thing. It’s “put up or shut up” with this approach. If there was a close call, if an opponent can overrule but does not, he really can’t complain after the fact (as many do otherwise) that he “was robbed.” And both must remember that making an overrule is simply a statement that one’s opponent “missed” the call, with no suggestion or emphasis that he intentionally called the ball poorly. I learned of this approach many years ago from David Benjamin, the coach for 25 years of the Princeton Varsity Men’s team. We use it as a condition of our challenge matches at Harvard, although, quite honestly, once players know they have this new power, trust is built and the overrule functions merely as a deterrent to an over-competitive player.
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