| Level B-2 | FINAL STANDINGS | Men's Doubles |
| Division 7 | Spring 1998 |
| 7 | 3 | 5 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 2 | 1 | Total | Pos | |
| 7 Windermere Park | x | 4 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 29 | 1st |
| 3 Seven Oaks | 1 | x | 4 | 2 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 25 | 2nd |
| 5 Belleterre | 2 | 1 | x | 3 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 21 | 3rd |
| 4 Belmont | 1 | 3 | 2 | x | 2 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 21 | 4th |
| 6 Pinewalk | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | x | 3 | 4 | 5 | 19 | 5th |
| 8 Silver Ridge | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 | x | 4 | 5 | 14 | 6th |
| 7 Deerlake | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | x | 5 | 10 | 7th |
| 1 Leeward Walk | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | x | 1 | 8th |
Silver Ridge 5 Leeward Walk 0
Seven Oaks 4 Deerlake 1
Windermere Park 3 Belleterre 2
Pinewalk 3 Belmont 2
After week 1: Silver Ridge 5, Seven Oaks 4, Windermere Park 3, Pinewalk 3, Belleterre 2, Belmont 2, Deerlake 1, Leeward Walk 0
Pinewalk 5 Leeward Walk 0
Silver Ridge 4 Deerlake 1
Seven Oaks 4 Belleterre 1
Windermere Park 4 Belmont 1
After week 2: Silver Ridge 9, Seven Oaks 8, Pinewalk 8, Windermere Park 7, Belleterre 3, Belmont 3, Deerlake 2, Leeward Walk 0
Belmont 3 Seven Oaks 2
Belleterre 4 Deerlake 1
Windermere Park 5 Leeward Walk 0
Pinewalk 3 Silver Ridge 2
After week 3: Windermere Park 12, Silver Ridge 11, Pinewalk 11, Seven Oaks 10, Belleterre 7, Belmont 6, Deerlake 3, Leeward Walk 0
Seven Oaks 5 Leeward Walk 0
Belmont 5 Silver Ridge 0
Belleterre 3 Pinewalk 2
Windermere Park 5 Deerlake 0
After week 4: Windermere Park 17, Seven Oaks 15, Pinewalk 13, Silver Ridge 11, Belmont 11, Belleterre 10, Deerlake 3, Leeward Walk 0
Pinewalk 4 Deer Lake 1
Windermere Park 4 Seven Oaks 1
Belmont 4 Leeward Walk 1
Belleterre 3 Silver Ridge 2
After week 5: Windermere Park 21, Pinewalk 17, Seven Oaks 16, Belmont 15, Silver Ridge 13, Belleterre 13, Deerlake 4, Leeward Walk 1
Belmont 4 Deerlake 1
Belleterre 5 Leeward Walk 0
Seven Oaks 4 Pinewalk 1
Windermere Park 4 Silver Ridge 1
After week 6: Windermere Park 25, Seven Oaks 20, Belmont 19, Pinewalk 18, Belleterre 18, Silver Ridge 14, Deerlake 5, Leeward Walk 1
Deerlake 5 Leeward Walk 0
Seven Oaks 5 Silver Ridge 0
Belleterre 3 Belmont 2
Windermere Park 4 Pinewalk 1
After week 7: Windermere Park 29, Seven Oaks 25, Belleterre 21, Belmont 21, Pinewalk 19, Silver Ridge 14, Deerlake 10, Leeward Walk 1
This was kind of a hard luck season. The 21-14 recond wasn't bad, considering the last time we played B-2 the win count didn't get to double digits, but there were definitely some bad breaks this season. The first bad break came before the season started, when (and this statement is only slightly exaggerated) we lost a key player to international politics. To hear the story, the player, a native of Brazil with a visa to enter the United States, was at the Atlanta Airport, prepared to re-enter the United States, when he noticed a Brazilian woman who, because she could speak no English, was having difficulty conversing with the immigrations officer. Our tennis player offered to act as a translator, but the immigrations officer would have none of that, saying the immigration office had its own translators. The officer then hunted down a translator. Unfortunately, the translator spoke Spanish, and, as our player informed the officer, Brazilians do not speak Spanish, they speak Portuguese. Based on this comment, our player was evidently construed to be some kind of subversive, so he was brought into a separate room and interrogated to kind out his real reason for wanting to enter the United States.
I'm sure the conversation in that room must have gotten pretty testy. Long story short, we lost a key player. (Hey, I know every team has hard luck stories on how they have lost key players, but how many teams have ever lost a player to immigration politics?)
Well, that missing player notwithstanding, we were still confident in our line-up and prepared to shoot for a division title. Unfortunately, the season started with two really bizarre matches. In the first match against Pinewalk, we won the first two matches in around 45 minutes and thought we were on our way to a 5-0 first week. Then we found out that the rest of the Pinewalk line-up was remarkably good as they won quickly on #3, #4, and #5. Evidently, Pinewalk's plan for the season was to put their best players at #3, #4, and #5 against the better teams. We figured that, against the weaker teams, the sacrificial lambs playing #1 and #2 would sit out and they would play a normal line-up.
Well, based on my previous experience in trying to make a sandbag claim (see my write-up on the Chickering match in Autumn, 1994) I didn't expect a formal complaint on the match to go anywhere, so I just wrote a note on the scorecard saying I thought Pinewalk's line-up arrangement was a little skewed. To my surprise, the co-ordinator called me to get more information, so I filled him in on a couple of incidents that happened at the match, those being:
The co-ordinator listened to all this, then told me he'd be watching this team very carefully -- ALTA didn't take kindly to this kind of line-up finagling, he told me. Needless to say, I was happy to hear that.
For the second match, our team went from the ridiculous to, well, more of the ridiculous. As if fielding a relatively weak line-up that week wasn't bad enough, we also had to contend with two opponents whose line calls were the worst that any of us had seen in B level tennis. In one match, our players stopped the match and called out to me from the courts, asking if there wasn't anything that could be done about the calls. (Nothing I could do, I told them.) In the second match, one of our players opted for a more flamboyant means of retaliation, nailing the opponent with an overhead immediately after he made an obviously bad call, upon which the opponent collapsed to the asphalt. All in all, this was a disheartening match -- we played them tough without a strong line-up, but lost three matches in three sets after winning the first set. Our opponents went on to win the division.
These two bizarre matches left us 3-7. Thankfully, the matches after that looked like tennis rather than exercises in surrealism. We never did quite get to a point where we had a good chance to make the playoffs, but we had some good competitive matches against some good teams. I think the most telling statistic was our record in three-set matches: 4-7 (In all 11 three-set matches, the winners of the first set lost the match!). The four three-setters that we won weren't really that close, if you go by the second and third set scores -- I like to think that, over the course of a season, the close losses are offset by lucky wins, but I can't honestly say it felt that way this season. Still, I wasn't disappointed with this season, and I felt that it was an indication of better times ahead. Time would tell.
As for the teams on our division that made the playoffs, we found out
later that Seven Oaks (the second place finisher in our
division) made it to the B-2 City Finals. They lost in the finals to a
team from Clayton State, a 32-3 team during the regular
season. That was certainly an encouraging result -- we had beaten
Seven Oaks 3-2 during the regular season. It showed that we could compete
with the best of them at this level.
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