To the box truck Baby! Yikes, I feel I should censured for our effort that led us to lose to the now 2-3 Funsters. We want to make the post season and we practice weekly but it didn’t happen for us Saturday, January 7th at Springton. Call it a memorable holiday season, tennis rust or “running in quicksand” but you can’t call our match pretty. The Funsters are exactly that, a group of fun loving Ferringo brothers or relatives (I’m not sure) that all play with a similar style. We came out flat and they made us pay by taking all three courts.
I’m not going to critique the individual teams in this match but what I did see was an inconsistent performance that yielded a solid win at 1st doubles and two 6-4 third set victories that could have gone either way. At first doubles Mindy Graziola partnered with Captain John Ferringo for an impressive win. Mindy and John were steady and somewhat aggressive and they earned their win. Mindy closed it out with a backhand winner down the line.
At 2nd and 3rd doubles, what I primarily witnessed was quite a few errors and shifts in momentum. 2nd doubles must have had double digit breaks of serves and while watching the match it was hard to tell who was winning. Suzanne Olson and James Ferringo were doing just enough to keep our guys off-balance and they earned the victory in a tight match.
Initially, I thought that 3rd doubles was looking good for us. Ron was styling in his Janko Tipsarević glasses and despite a slow start we were winning our share of the points. Jennifer Bastion and Joseph Ferringo seemed at times to waver but without fail they’d rebound from any adversity and prevent us from taking control. I had to leave 2 hours into the match and thus I was waiting for “the call.” “The call” needed to be soon for it to be good news. “The call” never came from my teammates as I’m sure they weren’t too thrilled about the results. This is the 2nd time in my history of captaining Mixed teams since 2005 that we have dropped all three courts (in about 100 matches).
John, James and Joseph (jingleheimer schmidt) sure did get us. Grrrrrr… Congratulations– nice job, all three Funsters teams seemed to have decent chemistry and I’m wondering how this team was 1-3 entering the match. Without a doubt, when you play tennis you will have a variety of performance levels. It is a hallmark of better players that when they are in a funk, they can snap out of their malaise, move their feet and adjust their strategy. If we lose another match, We are 
Farmers, bum buh-duh duh duh duh duh dum! Substitute Farmers with something else but keep the bum buh-duh duh duh duh duh dum!
Up next we face a good Springton K-O team on Saturday, January 14th. We have a difficult road ahead if we want to qualify for post season play but without question, we have
the talent. Tennis, the final frontier, with our continuing mission to boldly go where no one has gone before, well since the Pirates did it last year, to Sectionals.
On the 9.0 front we were able to put a scare into the first place team Tennis Addiction captained by Cindy Basile on Friday night by taking the first set on 2nd and 3rd dubs but this match didn’t turn out properly either. Good luck Tennis Addiction – this is a strong team.
I am looking forward to tennis Down Under next week. I have a good feeling about this tournament. No, not about my inevitable sleep deprivation, about
Roger Federer picking up his 17th Major championship. On the woman’s side – I’m thinking Vera Zvonareva will get it done.
A funny conversation I had with a co-worker talking about learning a computer programming language. He said he learned it when he got his G degree. I told him that I had never heard of Graduate school being called a G degree. He said, “not Graduate, Google.”
