WHAT I LEARNED IN MY FIRST SEASON
AS AN ALTA CAPTAIN
How to have almost as many friends at the
end of the season
as at the beginning.
Walter James August 1990
Being a captain of an ALTA team isn't easy. Being captain of an ALTA mixed doubles team may be impossible. Impossible, that is, if your goals are to win, to have a good time, and to please everyone on the team at the same time.
My team went to the playoffs this year (we lost in the first round), but there was a lot of unhappiness involved in getting there... for the team members, and therefore for the captain. A little experience goes a long way, they say; with that in mind, here are some suggestions (which I may take myself) for future captains, to minimize that unhappiness.
1. Establish a team philosophy. This is probably the most important suggestion to be made. The captain (and co-captain, and preferably the whole team) must decide at the beginning of the season whether the team's goal is to win at all costs or to be a social tennis team. The goal may be established by royal fiat from the captain (but watch out for revolt from the masses), or by team votes at a team meeting or by mail survey. Another way to do it, probably the worst way, is not to do it at all, so that no one knows what the philosophy of the team is, and everyone has a different idea as to how the rosters are made up and why.
I suggest a team meeting or survey at the beginning of the season, making sure everyone is contacted and allowed input, to vote on the team's goal: either to go all-out for the big win, which means not everyone will play equally (or, in some cases, at all) during the season, or to have a social team where everyone plays an equal amount, regardless of ability, accepting that the team will finish near the bottom of the rankings as a result. There is probably no middle ground between these two goals. In every division there are always other teams who are strong and going all-out for a win, and a social team rarely will be strong competition for them. If indeed the team votes to have a social goal, then "having fun" on tournament days and "losing" on those days will have to be considered the same things. But everyone will be allowed to play. On the other hand, with any roster much larger than sixteen (we had twenty- six), an all-out win team must accept that some members will play very little and others not at all during the season. While this may seem unfair to those not-so-steady players, it will be a lot less unfair if the team agrees from the beginning of the season that that is what the majority wants. Unhappily, every team has some players who probably should be playing on a lower team, but no one wants to mention it to them and they hang on, waiting for a chance to play. It must be made clear at the beginning of the season what they are to expect, to be most fair to the strong players as well as the not so strong.
2. Have a "partners" philosophy. Fortunate is the mixed doubles team with an equal number of men and women; more fortunate is the team where every player has a partner and likes to play with that partner. The captain (or, better, the team) with an unequal number of each gender must decide whether to play the men with different women (or vice versa), or to ask the team to pair off, leaving the unmatched members of the larger group to hope they will be asked to fill in when someone else's partner is absent. This choice of philosophy depends in large part on the team philosophy above; an all-out win team will do better against teams with fixed partners if it has fixed partnerships itself. Every division has teams wherein the men and women always have the same partner, and they play all the stronger for having played together every time. On a social team, on the other hand, more flexibility in matching the larger gender group with the smaller is possible: everyone gets to play.
3. Make sure the captain and co-captain agree. The captain may not be able to make it to all the matches and practices and may not even be in town at times that the roster for a given match has to be made up; obviously the co-captain must run practices and compose rosters in the same way the captain would, or team members will get confused. Captain and co-captain should discuss, at the beginning of the season:
a. How to run practices
b. How to decide who plays and who doesn't on a given weekend
c. Who will act as captain at home and away matches, when the captain
him/herself can't be there
d. How to handle the unhappy or unsportsmanlike player
4. Be sure the team knows what to expect from practices. Practice typically occurs one evening a week, with two courts available for however many of the team may attend; if considerably more than eight of the team come to practice, obviously not all of them will play the whole time. Deciding how to move players on and off the court may be dicey. An all-cut win team may want to use practice time to pit fixed-pairs partners against each other, either for practice itself or to decide rankings of the pairs. A social team may use the practice time just to put team members out on the court. It may be useful to rotate members on and off the court every four games, for example; a technique that worked well for us was to play four plus a tiebreaker, with the winners staying on and the losers rotating off on evenings when the attendance was low, or all the players rotating off every five games when the attendance was high.
5. Make directions to away games accurate. Nothing is more frustrating than having a forfeit in a match because a player couldn't find the host team's courts. I tried typing up directions and having copies at the club for the team to pick up during the week before an away match, hoping that this would work better than the directions given over-the-telephone technique, and it did. But even the best of plans may fail, and in our playoff match the directions given me by the other team's captain were so poor that the written directions were wrong, and the entire team got lost. I even went over a road map with my instructions to make sure that the directions were right, but, ALTA being what it is (it should be called NGLTA, for North Georgia Lawn Tennis Association), our last match was off the map. I don't know the answer to this one, unless the captain or his/her appointee is willing to drive over there during the week to check out the directions. If a member of the team is familiar with the away team's particular territory, it might be helpful to have him/ her review the directions for accuracy.