Recap

Matt and Dave Medina played over the weekend... No record of games, as Dave demanded that all camcorders be turned off and everything would be kept off the record. Seems like he will start playing some more and is expected to make a strong upward move in the club rankings, assuming that he can get his headphone issue sorted out...

Jesse, Jack, and Sam

Matt and Jesse

Monday's games started with Sam the first to show up. A first-year grad student, he played as an undergrad, but this was his first time to play with the club after taking 18 months off from the sport. His official "welcome to the club" game was against Matt, currently with the top point ranking in the club. Sam was game to play, and quickly showed that he can move about the court pretty well. His second opponent was Todd, who has been improving steadily since Fall quarter. It looked like Sam was winning some of the rallies when the ball went loose, but Todd's firepower and accuracy improved to become the deciding factor. Sam's last games were split against Jesse. Jesse has less experience, but has also been improving steadily since he started playing with the club last quarter, so the scores were pretty close. I think that the earlier games and Jesse's conditioning paid off for him to carry the last game. Sam was sitting on the floor when I saw him after the match... (yes, that would be the floor of the DeGuerre hallways -- altogether everyone... ewwww.... ;-)

In the meantime, Todd and Matt faced off for a pair of games. Todd thinks before he serves--something others of us should learn from, rather than just offering up any old serve. He has three primary serves: from center service box, he hits a drive to the backhand as well as an occasional hard Z to the forehand. His second serve is pretty uniformly a high lob along the backhand wall, served from the left side of the service box. The hard Z was especially effective--the first few caught Matt leaning, and he had to scramble back to recover. Mixing in a forehand drive serve would also complement this mix well (these are the same serves Matt favors from this position). Todd was also getting some good rips when he made his cross-over step so that his shoulders were facing the sidewall. Todd seemed to think these were flukes, but it was pretty consistent when he did the footwork to set up well.

With Todd and Sam just about played out, that left Jesse and Matt with reasonably fresh legs (some being more fresh than others--those some being Jesse's). Jesse commented that his Dad had taken a look at the video montage from last week, and had commented that Jesse seems to have improved. It is the truth, with many of his shots being hit with much more authority. He seemed to regress a bit in shot placement, though, with most of his serve returns going cross-court, to where Matt was camped out, waiting for the ball (last week Jesse had been hitting some solidly down the line, to get his serve back). Watch out for further improvements as he reviews the full match video from last week and works on his backhand some more! His footwork is getting much better.

Scoring Summary

This table ranks players by

Start Rank	Start Pts	Player	Earned Points	Offense
1	28	Matt	+10	(70)
11t	0	Sam	+7	(46)
4t	9	Todd	+4	(22)
3	16	Jesse	+4	(30)

(*) Rank - the club rank at the start of play.
(*) Start Pts - the number of ladder points at the start of play.
(*) Earned Points - the number of ladder points earned this evening.
(*) Offense - Total points scored in games this evening

Log of Games

Player A	Player B	Winner	Upset?	Score	Pts Earned
Matt	Sam	Matt	--	15-5	Matt (+2), Sam (+1)
Matt	Sam	Matt	--	15-4	Matt (+2), Sam (+1)
Todd	Sam	Todd	--	11-5 (only played to 11)	Todd (+2), Sam (+1)
Matt	Todd	Matt	--	15-6	Matt (+2), Todd (+1)
Jesse	Sam	Sam	++	15-9	Sam (+3), Jesse (+1)
Jesse	Sam	Jesse	--	15-11	Jesse (+2), Sam (+1)
Matt	Todd	Matt	--	15-5	Matt (+2), Todd (+1)
Matt	Jesse	Matt	--	15-6(?)	Matt (+2), Jesse (+1)

Upset - a (++) indicates that the lower-ranked player won