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 sets, a tiebreaker to 10 (win by 2 points) determines the winner.

Has anyone wondered how this seemingly non-intuitive scoring came to be? Although nobody knows for sure, using the word “love” could have derived from the French expression for “the egg” because an egg looks like the number zero, or because, at the start of any match when scores are at zero, players still had “love for each other”.  As far as the other points in the game, one theory is that the minute hand on a clock face was used to keep score. Since you had to win 4 points to capture a game, the hand moved 15 minutes for each point. However, since you had to win by at least 2 points, Deuce was introduced and the 45 was changed to 40. Therefore, if both players had 40, each point won/lost would add/subtract 10 until someone reached 60.  The only part of the scoring we know for sure is that the tiebreaker was introduced by Jimmy Van Alen in 1965 to speed up the game, which is probably what you want me to do with this article!

Anyway, the Varsity Girls tennis team hosted Northgate, who were undefeated in League play and coming off a 7-2 victory over Las Lomas and 9-0 sweep against College Park. Against that backdrop, the girls were able to claim two victories courtesy of Emily Roberts, who won her match 7-5, 6-4 and the doubles team of Ridhi Patel and Lauren Foster who won their match 6-2, 6-4. In addition, Sienna Moise had an impressive battle.  She dropped the first set 4-6, came back to win the second set 7-5, and narrowly lost the tie break 11-9.

The team hits the road Thursday (9/21) @ 4pm for a match against league opponent Las Lomas