About 8.0 Mixed
8.0 MXD Doubles
My first venture as a team captain came in August 2004 when I began recruiting a team for the 8.0 Mixed Doubles 2005 season which started in November 2004. Previously, I played 7.0 Mixed tennis starting in 2000 and then in 2003 I played some 8.0 Mixed for a team that invited me to join them for the 2nd half of the season. I was 4-1 at 8.0 and I was hooked! The next year, I asked a friend of mine if I could join her 8.0 MXD team for the 2004 season because my previous team disbanded and I joined up and played 5 matches which included one solid win at #1 doubles as my team upset the second best team in our flight.
I’m not sure why I decided to start my own team. Perhaps it was a masochistic tendency? Actually, the goal was simply to have my own team so I could call my own number as often as I wanted to play. Sounds good in theory right? In the first year, my Mixed team, called the Komet, went 12-1 and I played 7 times. I guess that went according to plan although we did have my one and only individual court default that cost us the match. If I had confirmed with our people as clearly as I do now we would have avoided that. That was one of many lessons learned over the years. The biggest lesson is simply to remember that this is just tennis. You are not allowed to get upset. A positive, energetic attitude is the only way to keep things fun which is essential to building team chemistry. The first year we had 20 people – a nice number considering only 6 play in any one match and we had 13 matches which provides ample court time to go around – roughly 4 matches per person if divided equally.
The 2nd year (2006) we had 26 players and 13 matches and we were clearly too big and my matches played dropped to only 5.
For the 2007 season I split the team in half and started a 2nd 8.0 Mixed team called K2. The Komet had 19 players and K2 had 17 players. The Komet went 10-1 that year and K2 finished with a respectable 7-4 record. Despite the more manageable number I was only able to play twice. The problem was that basically from the beginning I was unable to make our A lineup. Success breeds success and since every team we play is trying to knock us off we need to put out mostly our best players to win. Or, it just could have been my competitive nature that hates losing a set, a match or even when we spin the racket at the beginning of the match.
For 2008 we moved the team from Kinetix near King of Prussia, PA to Tennis Addiction in Exton, PA. We had 21 players and made Nationals. The USTA rule is that if you make Nationals you can only have 3 players on any one roster the next year. We changed our name to Port chops and Applesauce for 2009 and merged with the Spington team led by Vlad Grodecki to fill out our ranks. We have 22 players on the team now.
