On Tuesday, the Varsity Girls Tennis team traveled to Northgate High School for the Diablo Athletic League (DAL) Division Championship tournament. It was a record turnout as 16 Dons participated, two in singles and 14 in doubles (7 teams). Sophomore Aamena Shipchandler was seeded #6 on the singles side and advanced to the third round, and some of the other…
Although Major Walter Clopton Wingfield patented a hourglass shaped court in 1874 as part of his “New and Improved Court for Playing the Ancient Game of Tennis”, most tennis courts throughout history have been rectangular, measuring 78 feet long, 36 feet wide (27 feet for singles), with service lines 21 feet from the net. Grass courts are the most traditional tennis…
There are 4 types of serves in tennis. A flat serve, hit with a Continental or Eastern grip, is hard and powerful, making it ideal for a first serve. A slice serve creates sidespin, which can cause the ball to bounce farther away when hit into the outer corner of the service box, or right into your opponent’s body when hit down…
Tennis court nets are 42” high at the posts and 36” high in the center. They can be made from polyethylene, polyester, nylon, or steel mesh. Although net posts are typically outside the alley in the “doubles” position, professional courts can also be set up with the posts in the “singles” position inside the alley. Now for some fun facts…
As I sat down to write this article, I was thinking that I was running out of content having talked about the history of tennis, scoring, the US Open, rackets, balls, and so forth. Although I came up with a few other ideas that could show up in future articles, I thought I would dedicate this one to female athletes for…
Acalanes faced a strong Miramonte team on Tuesday, but the girls did win 3 lines of singles (Evelyn Lee, Ash Dawkins and Lauren Anderson) and 2 lines of doubles (Rachel Feldman and Addy Jeffery, Audrey Parkin and Sabrina Koo). We will get them next time!
We had a big win against Las Lomas winning all of the doubles and 5 out of 6 singles. The Las Lomas team had very strong singles players which our girls battled and prevailed against. Congratulations to Evelyn Lee, Hetty Lofting, Kate Widmann, Molly Jones and Zoe Stafford.
Early tennis balls were made of a variety of materials including leather stuffed with wool, a wool-wrapped stomach of a sheep or goat tied with rope, and putty and human hair. Today, they are surfaced by a felt-covered rubber compound and filled with a nitrogen and oxygen mixture. They are 2.57–2.70 inches in diameter and weigh 1.98–2.10 ounces. In 1972,…
Throughout most of tennis history, rackets were made of wood. Heads were around 65 square inches, and some rackets came with fashionable trapezoid-shaped “cases”. Although graphite composites rackets came out in the early 1980s, Swedish tennis legend Björn Borg tried to stage a comeback in 1985 in Monte Carlo with his standard small-headed wood racket because “he hadn’t tried the…
Anyone who follows tennis knows that the point scoring in a game goes “Love”-15-30-40 (plus “Deuce” and “Ad” if needed in order to win by 2 points), 6 games generally win a set, and 2 sets win a match in the women’s game. The rules for high school girls are the same except if the players split the first 2…