CoachV Call to Arms – Kick Serve Video Challenge!!!!!!!
Rules for contest:
- the Video should only be about 10 seconds long.
- The video must be a single shot.
- The View point will be a Back View.
- The Service Side will be Deuce for right handed players. and Advantage Side for Left handed players.
- Proper serving from base line( so if you foot fault you are disqualified ) & Faults do not count so don’t submit.
- Only Personal submissions,( the real you and your kick ) no other videos from Pros Example Federer’s 4 Kick Serve aces against Pistol Pete.
- Contest Starts MAY 1st, Submissions due by May 15th, May 30th I will pick a Winner ( i am disqualified from winning but I can Submit. I look forward to your votes though.)
- You can only submit one video. If you post & Remove and post again and I catch you. you are disqualified.
Quality of the kick Serve: Height of the bounce, Curve & Kick, And Where the second bounce lands.
Clay courts do not count due to lines changing directions. Cracks in tennis courts do not count Either. All Surfaces must be a hard court.
Good Luck.
Sincerely
CoachV – William Vazquez 404-829-4660
you win bragging rights… for now. Anybody out there want to be a Sponsor…… Mark any ideas?
Traxxas Rally VXl 3s in a tennis court
The battery is taped to the top of the chassis and that made it really top heavy and handle like poop.
Serena and Venus vs ITF for 2012 Summer Olympics
So Serena and Venus have always been 2 of my favorite women players on the WTA. They brought me into the sport. I remember being SOOOO STOKED when Serena and Roddick first announced their plans to play mixed doubles at the summer olympics. And now with this bad string of events, its not looking like V or Serena will make it. What does everyone else think?? Will the USTA be able to make it happen??
“Adelaide” Burton’s photos around Adelaide, Australia
A TripAdvisor™ TripWow slideshow of a travel blog to Adelaide, Australia by TravelPod blogger Burton titled “Adelaide” Burton’s travel blog entry: “Hi Guys, We are back with our last entry for Oz before departing to Thailand on 28th May. We left you in Canberra and then moved on to Wilson’s Promontory via Lakes Entrance. The hightlight here was free camping and it was a freezing cold night. The next day we continued our journey up to Wilson’s Promontory which was lovely. As soon as we entered the National Park we encountered Emu’s and Kangaroo’s just roaming around. We were even lucky enough to see a wombat as they do not usesually venture out in the daylight. We put on our walking shoes and went on four different tracks to get a good taste of the island. The scenery was beautiful and it was very quiet as we were well out of tourist season (we were the only people in the campsite!). After walking 22km, we left happy, but tired. We drove onto Phillip Island for the night and again were the only people in hte campsite. The following morning we took a walk up to “The Nobbies” (see pic) and walked along the coastline. The weather wasn’t great so we decided to hot foot it to Melbourne. Billy was happily driving through the city centre and we kept seeing signs about tolls, not realising that we had driven straight through a congestion charge area! In the morning we decided to use another mode of transport – the tram and headed into Melbourne. Our first port of call was …
Spring Ramble
Why is April the cruelest month again? Let me remind myself with a Google run. Right, it does that thing, according to Eliot, “breeding lilacs out of the dead, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” Hmm, actually that sounds about right. I guess there was a reason I liked that poem so much in college, even if it starts on kind of a downer. First there’s the title, “The Waste Land.” Then, right below that, there’s the equally enticing name of its first section: “The Burial of the Dead.” At that point, you might wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into. It doesn’t get any happier as it goes, as I recall.
Anyway, this past Sunday, as I walked over to the tennis courts in a nearby park—to watch, not to play just yet—April had not made Brooklyn look anything like a wasteland. The opposite, in fact: The Borough was in half bloom, dull roots obviously stirring all over the place. The haphazard lurch from hibernation back to life had begun. On block after block there were trees and bushes busting out, brighter than they will be all year. In between were hundreds, thousands more that remained barren. Through the branches you could see clouds flying. The ground was half mud. The wind had a chilly snap that curled around you and smacked you in the face whenever it could. It only felt good in the sun, but it really felt good in the sun.
The courts were full, as they usually are. I’ve lived in New York long enough that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be able to walk onto a set of empty municipal tennis courts and play for as long as you like for no money at all. A summer permit in New York is now 0, up from 0 a year ago, and people aren’t happy about it. It’s not easy finding courts, or, if you do, staying on them for more than one hour on the dot. An alarmingly loud alarm bell rings at the Central Park facility to let you know when you have to make yourself scarce. I hate thinking of all the courts that are sitting empty, left to slowly peel and crack, in dozens of towns just a few miles away in New Jersey or on Long Island.
But the action is here, in Ft. Greene Park, which has eight green hard courts. The neighborhood is at the multi-cultural heart of Brooklyn, and the park has a hipster vibe that spills over onto the tennis courts. Woolly beards are popular, as are Chuck Taylors and even beat-up black shoes. Diva worship is also in evidence; a black man in a blue bandanna had virtually all of Serena’s mannerisms and sound effects down perfectly. Few matches seem to be played; mostly people simply hit the ball back and forth. Is this what tennis is to the majority of people who hack around at it? A lot of players here look like they’ve had lessons at some point in their lives. They have the rudiments of strokes down from muscle memory, but it’s tough to tell how good they are. It’s always tough to tell how good a tennis player is just from watching them hit. Competition changes everything; in my experience, a very low percentage of people who can stroke the ball decently when they’re just hitting can make that stroke hold up during points.
Another standard feature of New York tennis quickly makes its presence felt: the minder. There’s always someone lurking around checking your permit, and the man on duty on Sunday in Ft. Greene was a stickler. A couple tried to take a baby carriage, with baby, on court. No go—“that’s against the rules,” the minder informed them. They had to park the kid outside the fence and try to keep him or her from crying while they played. And the pros think it’s tough to concentrate at Flushing Meadows.
I sat down on a bench behind the court and started to read; rec tennis makes for a good background visual and soundtrack—it’s nice to have there, but you don’t want to watch too much of it. It was blustery, it was raw, it was a little too chilly for total comfort, but the book was good enough to be distracting.
The trouble was, I couldn’t concentrate on the words. In front of me was another Brooklyn staple, the urban attention seeker. This particular hipster beardo, apparently, has decided to make performance art with a hula-hoop. (Everyone has their thing here; Brooklyn is the do-it-yourself entreprenerial capital of the universe, packed with all sorts of modern-day mom-and-pop clothing shops, restaurants, bars, specialty liquor stores, cheese shops, pig-butchering classes, you name it. At times it can make me yearn to go to a Red Lobster in a strip mall.) The hula-hoopist spun his intrument over his head, skipped rope with it, twirled it on his arm, and watched for any recognition from the bench sitters.
Worse, to my left an even more reliable New York stereotype had arrived: the loudmouth. Not a bellower, exactly, but something more insidious and aggressive, a guy who simply loves to hear himself talk, in a voice loud enough to sound authoritative. The conversation was all one-sided; when his friend was speaking, you could hear the loudmouth getting impatient.
He was loud enough to break my concentration, so I shut my book with a look in his direction—he didn’t notice, of course, being knee deep in his own verbal blizzard—and departed for a bench all the way at the end of the courts. Was it the day, was it the weather, was it New York, or did people seem better in theory than they did in practice? What does it mean to love books, movies, music, cheeseburgers, the world around you, and then get so easily annoyed by the actual humans you find there?
I tried to read again, but kept coming back to these thoughts as I watched the couple try to play while simultaneously making sure their baby didn’t disappear. In his book Inside Tennis, Pete Bodo made the point that nowhere do you reveal your true self more fully than on a tennis court, where you’re alone with just your thoughts to keep you company. Is this true? I had wondered it again while watching Milos Raonic and Ryan Harrison in Indian Wells. Harrison was edgy, annoyed by ball kid mistakes; a fan behind me called him “crybaby.” But in the dealings I’ve had with Harrison off the court, he’s been sensible, modest, a nice, level-headed, earnest kid all around.
Which is the “real” person? And what does it say about someone if they can remain calm and assured on a tennis court? The hero of Inside Tennis is Bjorn Borg, the man who deals with pressure better than any other. But, as the world would find out later, it came at a serious cost. Borg was forced to ignore and control his emotions—a whole side of his “true” personality, in other words—to an extreme degree. And no one would ever say that he had the most successful personality away from a tennis court. The opposite, in fact. So which was the true Borg?
I’ve played enough tennis to know that it can bring it a side of you that you might not even know exists. At the Division III NCAA Championships in 1989 at Kalamazoo, a roving official stopped behind my court and decided that I was crossing over the center line when I served (which I wasn’t). He called a foot fault on me at 3-3 in the first set. I basically lost all concentration on the spot and was broken. A few games later I lost the set. After the last point, I took a ball and hit it as hard as I could directly at the official, into the fence in front of him (no, I wouldn’t have hit it at him if the fence hadn’t been there). He gave me a warning and added, “I hope that ball wasn’t directed at me.” I never calmed down and lost the second set quickly.
Is that truest version of myself? It’s one version, and I think if you take the cases of Borg, Ryan Harrison and myself together, you would say that tennis proves that we’re all kinds of personalities at once. Think of your own stream of consciousness as it pours through your head. In the 10-minute walk from my apartment to the park on Sunday, I had swung all over the place in my mind, even if I didn’t show any of it on the outside. I was pleased with the day and the brownstone-lined streets, yet at the same time dozens of thoughts of the future made me unaccountably anxious and irritated. The only thing I can say for sure is that whatever I felt at one minute, I knew I wouldn’t be in that mood in an hour, or even have the same opinion on a given subject. These are our real travels, the uncontrollable travels of the brain. At any moment, sympathetic thoughts can cross paths with terrible ones. Or, as Bob Dylan so succintly put it: “If my thought dreams could be seen/They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”
The couple stopped playing, collected their crying baby, and left. The sun went down and the snap in the air grew chillier. I got up and started to walk out of the park. I walked past yet another beardo, looking up into a tree. “God,” I thought, “a birder.” He turned around and said, “See that? It’s a falcon.” I looked up and saw a highly dignified bird standing tall on a large branch, serenely ignoring the gawking humans below. I looked back the falcon as I walked out. He didn’t change expression or take note of anyone. He had our attention without even seeking it. Animals: So much cooler than we are.
Denise Dy (Washington) vs. Hilary Barte (Stanford), April 2011
This is the first set of the match between Washington’s Denise Dy (ranked #5 in the nation) and Stanford’s Hilary Barte (#4). It was the #1 singles match in a dual between the two schools on April 9, 2011 at Taube Tennis Stadium at Stanford, California.
Video Rating: 4 / 5