​Hello everyone,
 
Shingo is organising a handicap doubles tournament on Saturday 5 January in the main hall from midday to 3pm.
 
It should be a lot of fun and an opportunity for a get-together – a good way to start the year and get back into tennis, whether you haven’t played for a couple of weeks or a couple of years, and whether or not you are a member. We hope people who attend different sessions at Blackbrook will play.
 
There will be a £5 entry fee to cover the price of balls, tea, coffee, nibbles and perhaps some small prizes. You can enter as an individual, but if you’d like to enter as a pair, that should work as well.
 
The handicap scoring system is designed to even out differences in standard and produce close results. Are you paying attention? Here goes:
 

• If the score reaches deuce, only one more point is played. The receivers choose which side the deciding point is played from.
• If one team goes two games ahead, they start the next game 0-15 down.
• If they win that game and go three clear, they start the next game 0-30 down.
• If they lose that game, the handicap goes back to 0-15 for the next game.
• If they win that game and go four games clear, they start the next game minus 15-30 down.
• If they keep winning, the handicap remains at minus 15-30 down.
• If they lose, the handicap goes back down to 0-30.
• If they lose the next game, it goes down to 0-15, and so on...
• There are no sets. It‘s all done on games.
• The server stands on the correct side according to the score or it gets really confusing!!

 
It’s likely we’ll use a hit-and-mix (American-style) format, but we’ll decide on that when we have all the entries in. In this system there’s a top court (Court 1) and a bottom court (Court 4). When you win, you move up a court, and when you lose, you go down. You play against the person you’ve just played with.
 
Please enter by sending an email to [email protected] by Friday 28 December, preferably sooner to give us an idea of the kind of numbers we can expect. If this is a success, we’ll look into organising more such tournaments.
 
All the best and have a good Christmas,
 
Mike

Hello everyone,

Winter league
The winter league team has been having some good matches in the heights of Division 1 of the North Somerset Tennis League, where the standard is pretty high.

The website hasn't been updated recently, but it looks like we're fourth or fifth (out of six) and fighting for survival in the top division against Backwell.

The attached file shows the results so far, who played and the dates of the fixtures in the second half of the season.

Summer league
Although we're in the depths of winter, we should start thinking about how many teams we'll be entering in the summer leagues. To make things simple, if you played last year, we'll assume you're going to play again unless you tell us otherwise. If you didn't play last year and would like to, please let us know.

Mike