The Backboard: Why it Won't Come Back | General News - News The Backboard: Why It Won’t Come Back Bum . Bum . . . ba- dum. Bum . Player Selection Type. Players are selected from the National Standing List of the age division of the event. Entry Type. Entry to this tournament is open to all USTA. No-Cut School Tennis Teams play a critical role in growing tennis by allowing students of all abilities to join a team representing their school. Huntington Park and Folkes Stevens Tennis Center will be the main host venues for our USTA Mid-Atlantic Adult 55 & Over / Mixed 55 & Over League Championships. 2016 USTA League Tennis has arrived and is ready to serve you! USTA Wisconsin is excited to return familiar tennis programs. Read More. The Backboard: Why It Won’t Come Back Bum. ba-dum. Bum. ba-dum. Bum. ba-dum. Please don’t bother me now, I’m practicing. Please don’t bother me now, I’m practicing. With spring around the corner, I need to get my groundstrokes in order. Groove them. Smooth out the kinks, of which there are many. To accomplish all that means but one thing: Find a backboard. Am I the only person left on Earth who uses a tennis backboard? It sometimes seems that way. Once upon a time, every player hit regularly against big sheets of green plywood decorated with a white stripe. Or they used concrete or brick barriers. Even garage doors. Sharpening forehands and backhands by yourself. Keeping the ball going. Official home of the USTA. Includes professional tennis news and scores, information on leagues and tournaments, and related links. The 2016 Big Book of Colorado Tennis has landed. Packed with 100% Whole Grain Tennis, it truly is The Official Publication of. Read it online. Playing pretend points. Not caring about a thing till it was time to go home. Smacking the ball. Really belting it. A whaling wall. Almost a century ago, the great Bill Tilden endorsed backboards. When an infection led to the amputation of the tip of the middle finger on his racket hand, Big Bill had to change his grip. He worked on that change all one winter—on an indoor wall. When he saw his backhand as merely a defensive stroke, he went to the wall again and created a blistering drive. Whatever happened to backboards? To some extent they’ve gone the way of racket presses, long white flannel pants and net cord judges. Backboards are still with us, of course, but they’re far fewer in number. And many of those that have survived are in disrepair. Today’s young players are likely to work out with a hitting partner, a ball machine, a teaching pro. After all, you can’t trade heavy topspin with a fence. A backboard? Borrrrr- ing. Not to me. I’m a guy on the rebound. I won’t get on a court with anyone until I’ve spent time on a wall and wakened my strokes from their seasonal nap. For years I used a wall at the old University of New Mexico courts, on Central Avenue and the east edge of the campus. That complex is gone now, replaced by a parking lot and student apartments. These days I go to Albuquerque’s Montgomery. Park, where there’s a long wooden backstop. On occasion I’ll use a smaller one at the Arroyo del Oso courts. Most of the time I have those boards to myself. However, patience is required at both of those places for the walls share busy court space. That’s when I start thinking, 'What is with all you people playing games?'Doncha know the thrill is in the drill? Young players don't know the valuable lessons of 'wall ball' like they used to. Peaches got everything back—and more As a boy in the early 1. Peaches Bartkowicz. She built her entire game on a wall. When she was 1. 0, she hit 1,1. She stopped only when the school bell rang sounding the end of recess. No patty- cake shots for Peaches, either. Such training led her to capture a remarkable 1. U. S. junior titles and a Wimbledon junior singles crown. Bartkowicz (right) grew up in a poor immigrant family in Hamtramck, Mich., a Detroit suburb. Her elementary school gym teacher was a tough tutor named Jean Hoxie. Mrs. Hoxie’s rule: You will hit against a wall until you drop. The tall, pigtailed Bartkowicz did that and more. She developed one of the first two- handed backhands. Her forehand turned into a needle- threader. With such shots, she didn’t need to volley. In fact, in matches she came to net every other year. Oddly, she didn’t need to stay back. She once struck 9. Peaches’ given name was Jane, but no one called her that. She had a younger sister nicknamed Plums (aka Christine), who was also a wall devotee, but nowhere near as consistent. Though Peaches never played a tournament in the Southwest, her legacy can be found in New Mexico. Gene Russell settled in Albuquerque in 1. Atomic Energy Commission. He too had grown up in Hamtramck. Like Bartkowicz, Russell learned the game from Jean Hoxie. She coached his high school team in Hamtramck, one of the first boys’ teams anywhere to be coached by a woman. “Mrs. Hoxie had everybody hit on the wall,” remembers Russell, 9. She didn’t know a lot about technique. The town had limited public courts, so we used a wall inside a gym in the winter and then handball courts outside the rest of the year. She pushed kids. Pushed them hard.” On his own on one of Hoxie’s walls, Russell figured out how to hit a high backhand. I worked on that again and again until I could come over the ball. If I had tried that on a court, it would have taken me a lot longer to get it. When you’re on the court with someone else, you spend half the time picking up balls.” The backboard as a family tradition A strong proponent of backboards, Gene Russell knows their limitations. You can’t get the variety of spins or angles or speed that you can on a court.” Nonetheless, the wall helped propel Russell to the No. Western. Michigan. University. In 1. Hoxie protégé, Fred Kovaleski, won the doubles at the U. S. Public Parks, then a prominent tournament. Russell’s two tennis playing sons hit on walls as kids. Ted, the eldest, won the New Mexico high school singles three times. Tim took it twice. Both excelled on the UNM men’s team. Kyle Russell, Tim’s son and Gene’s grandson, also played for the Lobos and coached for a spell, at the College of Santa Fe. Ted, who died in a Phoenix auto accident in 1. Southwest singles at a time when that adult event attracted top players from across the country. Tim coached the UNM men’s team for four years in the 1. At age 5. 9 he has a commercial real estate firm in Albuquerque and doesn’t get out on the court much. “If I did go back to playing,” he says, “I would definitely find a wall right off.” When he was 1. Tim Russell (above right, pictured with father Gene)spent time at the Hoxie Tennis Camp, on the Detroit. River. The famed camp was one of the first summertime tennis camps in the country. Mrs. Hoxie was always holding these camp tournaments. If you lost a match, you were sent straight to the backboard. You had to hit, say, 4. It was punishment, but also a great training tool. If you missed one, you had to start over. You could stay there an hour before getting back on the court.” When Tim came home from the Hoxie camp, he raved about the improvements in his game. Gene Russell, a modest, quiet man then nearing 5. Tell you what. I’ll play you while I’m smoking a cigar.” Close, but no beating the cigar. In 1. Gene Russell was among a group who founded the Tennis Club of Albuquerque. The club originally had three courts. Today it has 1. From the 1. 95. 0s through the 1. TCA was the center for New Mexico tennis. Gene Russell mentored numerous young players there, encouraging many of those to hit against a wall. Early on, the Tennis Club of Albuquerque had a backboard that fronted a court. No more. The current backboard is a cinderblock wall tucked in an adjacent alley. An attached basketball hoop is used more than the wall is. Most TCA members hit with each other or with the head professional, Dave Ochotorena or one his staff. Kind of sad,” Tim Russell says inspecting the club’s forgotten wall. Learning to hit the Hoxie way No sadness fills the voice of Peaches Bartkowicz. I reached her by telephone in Hamtramck, where she still lives, at age 6. I just became a grandmother for the first time,” she told me. Bartkowicz (pictured here - CENTER back row with the WTA original 9 players) now works for the federal courts and will retire this spring after 2. She copes with a blood disorder —“the opposite of leukemia,” she says. She has not held a tennis racket in more than two decades, and that’s fine with her. Jean Hoxie died in 1. By then Barkowicz was a touring pro, one of a group of nine who created what became today’s women’s tour. She won six singles titles as a professional and three titles in doubles. Twice she reached the quarterfinals at the U. S. Open. She achieved a world ranking of No. Bartkowicz and Hoxie had a bumpy relationship. So demanding was Hoxie that Bartkowicz developed severe headaches that cut short her career. She stopped playing professionally in 1. She was only 2. 1. “I have no regrets,” she says. I’m grateful that I learned the game the way I did.” The secret for her success was, of course, uncannily accurate ground strokes. We would create a line on the wall to be the net,” she says. We’d put another line about six inches above that. Then we’d stand back and try to hit the ball between the two lines. Then we’d make a square on the wall and aim for that. Then we’d have two squares and rotate between them. We served to spots there too. As long as you make it interesting, rather than just hitting against a wall, I still think it’s good practice.” Try this for interesting: Hoxie would place a boy against the wall and then would have Bartkowicz hit the ball around the kid. He would extend his arms out and I would hit the ball to his left, to his right, above his head. Then he would stand there and extend a racket. I had to hit the racket out of his hands. You just have to make practice fun.” Bum . Bum . . . da- dum. Bum . Home | Affiliated Organizations | USTA Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Tennis Association (WTA) is a non- profit organization that is the governing body of all USTA tennis play in the Wisconsin District and has guided Wisconsin tennis activities for over 8. The WTA services over 2. The Wisconsin District includes all counties in Wisconsin EXCEPT Barron, Bayfield, Buffalo, Burnett, Chippewa, Douglas, Dunn, Eau Claire, Pepin, Pierce, Polk, Rusk, St. Croix, Sawyer, Trempealeau, and Washburn. WTA is one of the 1. USTA/Midwest Section.
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