December 24, 2013

I'm going to take today and tomorrow off - after all, today's Christmas Eve! More importantly, I'm still on west coast time (from the Nationals in Vegas), and when I tried to get up early this morning to do the blog, I was rewarded with a morning headache. So I'll return on a daily Mon-Fri basis on Thursday, Dec. 26 (day one of our Christmas Camp), where I'll blog about the hidden serve problems we had at the Nationals, including a mind-boggling argument over the definition of "satisfied," since the serving rules state, "It is the responsibility of the player to serve so that the umpire or the assistant umpire can be satisfied that s/he complies with the requirements of the law." (When two referees tried to redefine what it meant, I Princess Brideian told them, "I don't think that word means what you think it means." I finally wrote out the definition for them from the online Merriam-Webster dictionary.) To tide you over until then, here's Samson Dubina's new website, which has a number of coaching articles, so why not go explore that? (Samson, a full-time coach in Ohio, won Over 30 at the USA Nationals and is a former Men's Singles Finalist at the Nationals.) Now I'm going to take a few Bayer Aspirins and go back to bed.