Tennis in Ireland

The first difference between the U.S. and Dublin is that there are not really public courts in Dublin, at least not in the part where I live.  Although there are a fair number of courts in parks, one needs to belong to the appropriate association / group in order to play on the courts.  For example, these courts are in a park about a ten-minute walk from my house (http://www.carraigtc.ie/).  The courts are not in very good shape.  So far, I haven’t tried this club.

Another big difference is the surface of the courts.  Here, the courts are Astroturf with sand underneath.  Apparently, these are the only courts that are playable in this lovely climate.  It simply rains too much for hard courts – they’d be wet all the time.  It even rains too much for clay courts (and they’re a lot more work to maintain).  They are not so bad, but they are different – like a slow hard court (not good for my serve-and-volley style).

There is a nice club about five minutes’ walk from the house.  And it has a bar on site.  Furthermore, the annual fee includes a tab for the bar.  But it is not accepting members at the moment.  However, they anticipate that they will have an opening in the fall or winter, as there is a lot of turnover in membership.  Still, they let me come down and hit one evening.  Too bad that it was VERY windy and I hadn’t played in six weeks.  So I was terrible.  Still, I enjoyed meeting some people, and we had a pint afterwards while watching Wimbledon (Federer’s five-set match against Benneteau).  I fear that they were trying me out for their league team, and I failed.

In the meantime, I have joined the staff / grad student tennis club at University College Dublin.  It’s what they call here “cheap and cheerful”.  Membership is only 45 euros a year, and they have free court time on Monday and Thursday evenings.  My first event was a mixer – what they called a summer barbeque.  It was a mixed doubles round-robin followed by burgers (or hot dogs) and beverages.  Two or three were similar in ability, so I’m hopeful that I can arrange matches with them.  It was very multinational – I talked to people from Spain, France, Columbia, and Mauritius.  Rumor has it that another person from Iowa is a member of the club!

They have leagues and tournaments here as in the U.S.  I have learned a bit about a couple of the leagues, which I’ll share.  In the U.S., each player has a ranking, and then plays in leagues against people of similar rank.  It works pretty well aside from the people who are more interested in winning than in being ranked accordingly.  In Ireland, the leagues are divided like football (soccer) into divisions.  The top teams move up a division, and the bottom teams move down.

Another league is quite interesting, although I’ve forgotten the name of it.  Each match has four players.  The four names are put in a hat.  Two people chosen at random play singles, and the other two play doubles.  I think I’d like this league, as I’m happy playing singles or doubles.

I’ll conclude this post with a mention about tennis in Kentucky.  My tennis team finished third, and the first two teams make the playoffs.  However, my team got a wild card to the playoffs (because another team decided not to attend or because they needed another team to have the right number of teams overall).  However, we couldn’t field a team (I obviously could not attend).  It was the first time I’d made the playoffs in 6 years of tennis in Kentucky – bummer!