The Lady Reddie Tennis team clinched a spot in Gulf South Conference (GSC) tournament in Montgomery, Ala. on April 6. The team they beat was none other than one of their arch rival, Ouachita Baptist University (OBU). The Lady Reddies won with a final score of 6-3. The Lady Reddies have had an up and down season beating Southern Arkansas twice and Christian Brothers, but losing to teams like Arkansas Tech and Harding. The Lady Reddies will finish their season losing to Arkansas Tech 6-3.
Now I know that many people cannot get into tennis because they do not really understand it, well I will try to give you the basics on how tennis matches are set up and how to play tennis, so you can go and play yourself.
College tennis matches, like Henderson’s normally last a few hours. The match starts with doubles (a match between two teams of two players each.) and then goes to singles (I think you can figure this one out). Tennis has many terms that can be hard to understand so to learn more tennis terms and their definitions check out this website.
To understand tennis fully you may need to know so history of tennis and how the game became what it is today. For that check out this article. Basically, the game of tennis was more a royal game and the royalty did not want the uneducated common person to understand the game and how to play, so they made the rules and scoring confusing. So, if you are thinking to yourself I don’t understand why tennis scoring makes no sense, it is because it is meant to be confusing.
Now let me explain how to keep score and a little bit about how to play. Keeping score in tennis is a lot different than most sports, but is easy to understand once explained. You start off love-love or 0-0 (love= 0). Then if your serving and you score it is 15-0 or 15-love because the servers score is always announced first. If you score again then it is 30-0, then 40-0. The next point is game point (or set point but this will be explained later). If the game is tied 40-40 then this is called “deuce.” The next person to score then gets the “advantage” because if they get the next point they win. The player servings score is announced first and you can win a point by the other player hitting the ball out of bounds or into the net or not hitting the ball at all. The first to win 6 games wins the “set.” A match is won when a player wins either 2 out of 3 sets (women) or 3 out of 5 sets (men). Now that you know how to keep score you can go to the Lady Reddies tennis matches and understand what is going on.
Well knowing how to keep score doesn’t help you actually get out there and play, but here are some videos that show the basic hits in tennis.
First there is the serve.
Next there is the forehand.
Then there is the backhand.
Don’t let the videos fool you these basic hits are hard to prefect and take practices, but playing tennis is a lot of fun. So next time there is a nice afternoon and you and a friend don’t have anything to do, head down to the tennis courts.
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