liyinjustserved

[liyinjustserved]

Tennis Recovery

As I said in the last post, I just finished a pretty hard tournament in Mobile, AL, and my body is FEELING it.

To recover, I try to do some stretching before and after the matches. I'm going to ice my shoulder and right arm later, as that's what is hurting the most.

I'm going to take a few days off of tennis, just so my body can really heal. My teammates think I may have a micro-tear in my right tricep, so I really need to give that a rest.

I'm going to stay super hydrated, drinking lots of water and electrolytes, and hopefully I can feel back to 100% in no time.

The 8 hour drive back to South Carolina is going to be tough, but I think that if I get up and stretch every few hours, it should be alright.

[liyinjustserved]

Sectionals Recap!!

This past weekend, I played mixed sectionals in Mobile, Alabama! This is for adult league and is not related to school or club tennis.

I played 4 matches and only won 2, but they were the only two matches my team won overall, so I would say that's a win!

All of my matches were really close, but I think the heat and exhaustion got to me. These matches were 2 out of 3 sets, as opposed to club tennis matches which are only 1 set. All the muscles relating to my serve, especially my tricep and my left obliques, are super sore and tender.

Overall, this was a super fun tournament. My team and I had a great seafood dinner, and I always love staying in hotels with friends.

[liyinjustserved]

What Did I Play This Weekend?

This weekend, for the Orlando tournament, I played a lot of matches! Let's get into what I played specifically:

Against GSU, I played mixed doubles and won 6-0.

Against FAU, I played mixed doubles and won 6-1.

Against Georgia Tech B, I played girls doubles and won 6-4. I also subbed in at 4-7 for mixed and won (sort of, complicated rules).

Against Miami A, I played mixed, and lost (forgot the score, I think 6-3).

Against Auburn A, I played mixed and won 6-1 (I think).

Against Georgia Tech A, I played mixed and won 6-1.

I'm pretty happy with how I played this weekend. I think it's rare to think that I played great, so I'm glad that I thought I played okay.

[liyinjustserved]

Some Tournament Deets

Hi everyone! From Thursday-Sunday I was in Orlando, Florida, for a club tennis tournament! The winner of this tournament got a bid to Nationals!

We didn't find out about it until a week earlier, so it was pretty rushed and we didn't have our best people, but it still ended up okay. We had a 5-1 overall record, with one loss to Miami's A team.

We had a 9am match on Friday, a 11am, and then an 8am, 10am, and 2:30 on Saturday, and finally an 8am today (Sunday!)

It was about a 7 hour drive, but my teammate who drove may have made that drive a little shorter.

We overall came 5th out of 20 teams, which wasn't our best, but again we didn't have our best players. I personally had a lot of fun.

[liyinjustserved]

Fav Tennis Players!

Having a favorite professional in anything will definitely make you pay more attention to the sport. While I am not an avid pro tennis fan, I do have my favorites.

Roger Federer is everyone's favorite. While he is retired now (I cried), he was always such a gentleman and had the most beautiful footwork. Sometimes, when I watched him, I would just watch how his feet moved so quickly. It was almost like dancing.

Hsieh Su Wei is my current favorite. I don't feel like a lot of people know about her, even though she's been #1 for women's doubles before. She is known to be incredibly versatile, and has the nickname of "the Magician". She is so creative on the court, and I feel like it's so difficult to be known for that.

I used to love watching Maria Sharapova. She was such a powerhouse, and she was also really pretty, which I thought was pretty important as a 10-year old.

[liyinjustserved]

Club Tennis Practice!!

As part of a club tennis team of a pretty big school, you might be interested as to how we run practice!

Keep in mind that we are one of the only schools ever where the club team is not allowed to use the actual team's courts. Because of that, we have to rent courts at a facility 10-15 minutes away from campus and pay for those every month. That adds up to several thousand a semester!

Again, because we have a limited amount of courts, there isn't a lot of drills we can do. We also have a limited amount of balls (since we pay for those ourselves).

We usually start off practice with warmup until 7:15-ish, and then we split up into teams to play team singles. Team singles is just when you play points against another person, and if you win, you stay in to play another point. If you lose, you rotate with the next person on your team. Whichever team hits 11 points (out of everyone at practice) yells "SWITCH!" and you go up a court if you won, and down if you lost.

After that, we usually either play Dingles or doubles. Dingles is a bit of a complicated game, but it's essentially 4 people on the court playing with half the court (so two singles points) until one of them loses. Then the remaining ball from the other singles point becomes full-court instead of half. If your team wins both singles points/ball, you get a point! First to 5 gets to yell "SWITCH!"

Thanks for reading!

[liyinjustserved]

Club Tennis Tryouts - How do they work?

This past week, USC club tennis had their tryouts to join the team! We had tryouts on Wednesday, Thursday, and a makeup tryout on Friday morning. I was there about half the time on Wednesday, and the full time on Thursday, and was 1 of the 2 people there on Friday (of exec). Also, if I didn't mention before, I hold the Treasurer position on the USC club tennis executive team!

How did we run them? We had three courts. For Wednesday, we had one court of just everyone playing some points or games as they waited their turn, and the other two courts had club tennis members hitting against our potential new members. Those two courts were being watched by a couple of exec members, who would assign everyone a different color in the excel sheet - for example, light green meant "heck yes!". On Thursday, we had less people, so we had two courts that we weren't watching and one court for the actual tryout. Friday morning was for the few people who couldn't make the other two days, and I was hitting with them on just one court while another exec member wrote notes.

When you first walk up, you had to scan a QR code and fill out some information to register on this new platform (similar to Garnet Gate), as well as give your contact information to another exec member. Then, you were good to go hit and warm up a bit with everyone else.

I wasn't too involved with the actual judging on Thursday, and did my best to be involved with the 'fun' courts and talk to everyone. I also helped organize those courts a bit - they tried to separate the two courts into guys and girls, and we were not about that. The lines to hit for those courts were also quite messy, so I had to direct them into straighter, more distinct lines.

Here's a little, slightly blurry screenshot from the club tennis instagram, where you can see me being pretty excited! This was before we forced the guys to mix with the girls, so there weren't a lot of people on this court. There were a lot more on the other court, out of frame.

Tomorrow, we'll send out the emails for who did and didn't make the team. I'm very excited for the new members coming to practice on Monday!

[liyinjustserved]

Tennis Tournament Setups!

In every level or different category of competitive tennis, there's different set-ups - say, different amounts of matches or different scoring. We already went over some of the scoring, so let's go over the other stuff!

In tennis outside of school, just a normal tournament that you sign up for by yourself, you'll be playing bracket-style (for singles or doubles). However, for a club tennis tournament, one match (say USC's team against UGA) will consist of 5 smaller matches. There will be a girl's singles, a girls' doubles, a boy's singles, a boys' doubles, and a mixed match! All of these are one set, and whichever team has more GAMES overall wins! For example, say your team wins all 5 matches 6-0, you'd be winning the match 30-0.

I've also experienced some different things with adult tennis (outside of school). One tournament that I played had two doubles matches and one singles match (all for the same gender, and all full matches like 2 out of 3 sets). I played a mixed doubles league in May, and that was matches every week. Every week there were 3 mixed doubles matches, and if you won 2 of the 3 you won the whole match.

Of course, there's a lot more different layouts than just these few, but these are just some of the ones I've experienced!

[liyinjustserved]

Behind the Scenes (of a tourney player)

I have been playing tennis for a pretty long time, and have experienced a lot of funny, weird, unfortunate times. Here's a few examples of little stories or facts that I could think of off the top of my head.

One time, I absolutely crushed this girl (like a really bad score) and when we went to shake hands at the end of the match, she basically made me shake her thumb. Her hand was SO incredibly limp, like a dead fish. It was super awkward and I could see her tears behind her sunglasses.

Right before a playoffs match for high school tennis, both of my rackets broke, meaning the strings popped. There's so many reasons why playing with your own racket is the best, and having to try to adapt to a different racket in the span of a couple minutes was definitely not fun. I lost the match.

When I'm sick, and I serve, the movement of my head back and forth/up and down is so disorienting I usually end up seeing stars or having black in the edges of my vision.

I was watching my brother play a tournament match and a goose ran onto the court and wouldn't leave. It also honked...a lot.

I've played tournament matches past MIDNIGHT.

I used to absolutely hate when my dad watched me play. He would try to casually walk by, but I would always see him. He had to resort to hiding behind bushes just so he could see how I was doing.

I think I had a crush on every guy that beat my brother in tournament matches.

[liyinjustserved]

Why is it SO DIFFERENT?

In the last two posts, I covered quite a bit of scoring. Let's talk a little about the differences between different levels/categories of tennis.

In junior tennis, unless it was a pretty high-level tennis, we would play 2 out of 3 sets, with the 3rd set being a 10-point tiebreaker (win by 2). In higher level tournaments, you would play the whole 3rd set out, so not a tiebreaker, but a set consisting of games.

In club tennis, you switch sides every 4 games. In most other levels of tennis, you switch after the 1st game of the set, and then every 2 games after that. Switching sides means, yes, switching sides, but also taking breaks and drinking water when you pass the bench on the changeover.

Another difference is that for club tennis, you only play 1 set. I'm not sure what the reasoning is, but it definitely helps when you're a busy college kid and can't get in that consistent training or conditioning that you used to get for free in high school. I can personally tell that my endurance is not the same, and I do find myself out of breath a decent amount.

Here's a link from the USTA (the United States Tennis Association) that just once again covers scoring.

https://www.usta.com/en/home/improve/tips-and-instruction/national/tennis-scoring-rules.html

[liyinjustserved]

Why is There So Much Love in Tennis Scoring?

For my first real post, I've decided to cover two parts of tennis scoring - points and games. A lot of my friends that I've forced to watch my matches agreed that they enjoyed it a lot more when they understood the score.

In most other sports, you call the whole game, a game. Most other sports also only have points. Tennis has points, games, sets, and then the whole thing is called a match. Confusing, I know.

A point is the most basic. I think most of you can understand what a point is, but I can go into more detail later if needed. Every game consists of who wins 4 points first. If you tie at 3 points, you will go back and forth until someone wins 2 points in a row. However, we don't say 1-0 if you have one point and the opponent has zero. We say 15-love. Love basically stands for zero, which is something a lot of my non-tennis playing friends didn't understand before. It goes: 15, 30, 40, and then if you win the next point you win the game. If you tie at 40-40, meaning both you and your opponent have 3 points each in the game, that's called deuce.

If I win the next point, and I'm serving (server calls the score out loud), I would say "Ad-in", meaning I have the advantage. If I lose that 40-40 deuce point and I'm serving, I would say "Ad-out", meaning my opponent has the advantage. The same is true for the opposite: if my opponent is serving and I win the deuce point, they would say "Ad-out", and vice versa.

In some tournaments or different levels of playing, they don't even include deuce. Say, for example, there was a rain delay and everyone is trying to finish matches as quickly as possible. The officials might say that we're "not playing Ad", meaning at the deuce point (40-40), whoever wins the next point wins the game!

All that is considered one game! If I win that game, that would be 1-0 in game scoring. That could be why some tennis matches last so long. In the next post, I'll cover sets and matches, as well as the rules. Thanks for reading!

[liyinjustserved]

Tennis Blog - Introducing Me!

Hi everyone! My name is Liyin Zhu and I am a junior at the University of South Carolina. I'm a double major in Finance and Accounting, with a minor in Data Science and a concentration in Business Analytics. Not too sure what I want to do in the future, but I think the next step is going to grad school to get my MBA!

I have been playing tennis since I was about 7 years old. I played many, many tournaments in juniors (18 and under) and played on the varsity team at my high school for 6 years. Currently, I play #1 for the club tennis team here at USC, and play a lot of matches outside of school as well. I actually am playing a tournament right now and am going to go have lunch with my team after this post! Tennis is something I am incredibly passionate about, and I hope to cover all the ins and outs of tennis (and anything else you want to know) in this blog. I love this sport and I think it's such a great way to get some exercise in. It's one of those sports that you can continue even when you're 70 years old (or older!). My favorite professional player is Hsieh Su Wei, for many reasons, but mainly her unorthodox play style. Here's a youtube video by Tennis Advocate highlighting some of her best plays if anyone wants to check it out!

Glad to have you here!