CBRC Team Tennis

Join the exciting Team Tennis League on Sunday afternoons... rosters fill up fast! If you are interested, please call the league coordinator, Vody Vodinh (539-6433)!

Vody Vodinh organizes ten courts of highly competitive tennis for three hours on Sunday afternoons in the Fall and Winter. Teams are put together to compete against equally matched teams on 2 singles courts and three doubles courts. Men's Singles, Men's Doubles, Women's Singles, Women's Doubles, and Mix Doubles fill out the roster. Twenty matches are played every Sunday during the Team Tennis season.

History of Cedar Bluff Team Tennis

by Vody Vodinh

In 1965 when I started playing tennis I joined the Indianapolis Racquet Club, the first indoor tennis club in Indiana and signed up for lessons with the club pro named Ed Brune.

Among the various tennis activities at the club there was a league called the Industrial tennis league run by one of my co-workers at RCA named Ralph Gunn. I wasn't good enough to be a regular on the RCA team which was captained by Ralph but since we were friends he let me sub on his team whenever they needed a sub. So I got to play a lot and that was my first impression of league tennis. I never experienced so much enjoyment just playing in the league. The league set- up had made my playing so simple, so convenient and so much fun and great camaraderie that I was immediately sold completely on the league idea. I became a changed man through that experience.

Then in 1971, I left RCA and joined the Magnavox company in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Fort Wayne didn't have any indoor tennis at that time so I had to drive back to Indy to play tennis.

It wasn't a long drive and the time it took was about equal to two long sets of tennis each way so it wasn't too bad if I thought in terms of tennis.

Luckily for me Fort Wayne built its first indoor tennis club in 1972. Now with a little bit of experience in league tennis, I approached the club management and offered to organize a tennis league for them. The club was enthusiastic about the idea and The Fort Wayne Industrial tennis league was born. Wildwood Racquet Club was home for the league. In the beginning the league was the only popular club activity.

Fall 1972 was our first season. Player response was great. We had eight teams with eight players per team. Teams from International Harvester, General Motors, Insurance companies and even grocery stores wanted to sponsor teams for the league. Every week we put league results in the local papers and Company sponsors and players enjoyed the publicity. The season usually lasted nine months. Up north the indoor season is a lot longer than down here.

Players were looking forward to every Sunday to compete in the league. The Fort Wayne Industrial Tennis League was very successful for the first five years. In fact it was too successful for its own good.

Team competition was fierce and team captains began to think of ways to win. One of the damaging strategies that some captains used was to sacrifice certain matches to stack up their team line up in three other matches. The old team format was two Singles and three Doubles. A team needed to win 3 out of 5 matches to win the meet.

Now there is nothing wrong with that strategy when matches are played outdoors and free of charge. With the advent of indoor tennis, players had to pay for their court time and this situation created problems among players who were sacrificed by their captain. Players paid to have decent matches to keep their interest going. We started having problems among the players more frequently. A few players were not happy with the competition format. Still, the league was fun for a lot of players. More players wanted to join the league as some others dropped off. Since I was solely responsible for the league, I felt a need to find a better way to neutralize that sacrifice strategy. After going through several options I presented the option that I felt the simplest which required the least supervision to the team captains.

This concept is 100% team effort, every player and every game counted. All the team captains agreed that the new idea of team scoring didn't change the game of tennis that we had been playing and that the scoring didn't take place until after all the matches were completed. The team tennis concept helped solve many of our league problems. Indoor court time was limited to one hour and a half per session. With this new scoring system we didn't have to worry about matches not being able to finish within an hour and a half. The rule is to play for an hour and a half or best 2 of 3 sets whichever came first. If you won in 2 sets and still had time you could keep on playing for fun.

The score didn't count anymore and if you didn't finish the matches in that time limit you just stopped when your time was up. To satisfy this time limit we also suggested that the 9-point tiebreaker (sudden death) instead of the 12-point (lingering death) should be used. The winning team no longer had to win 3 of 5 matches played . The winning team was the team that won the most games in all matches at each meet. Every player contributed and the team motto was to win big and lose little. Even the weakest player could win that extra game to help out his team. The scoring was done after all matches were concluded with captains reporting their team match scores. Games were added up and the winning team would have the most games won. Everybody understood the new team concept and the league was scheduled to resume action the following fall of 1976. To mark the end of our old league and the birth of our new league we decided to change the name of the league to The Fort Wayne Team Tennis.

Fort Wayne Team Tennis was the most popular tennis activity at Wildwood Racquet Club..I thought this success was partly due to the fact that we had left the game of tennis intact while changing all the rules around it..The games had no shortcuts or were in anyway altered. I kept it going till 1980 when I had to leave Fort Wayne and move with my company, Magnavox which was just bought out by Philips, the giant consumers electronic firm from Europe.

Before I moved I turned the league over to a friend of mine who had been a team captain since the league started in 1972.

My move was completed in June 1980 and it was time for me to get back to my usual tennis activity that I had been doing the last 8 years in Fort Wayne. I approached Cedar Bluff Racquet Club and presented my team tennis program to the club management. The club wanted it and with the best foundation a tennis league could have I started the Cedar Bluff Team Tennis at the Cedar Bluff Racquet Club in the fall of 1980.

Compared to the Fort Wayne Team Tennis, the Cedar Bluff Team Tennis was quite small with only 4 team of 8 players per team. We used the same 5 match format, 2 Singles and 3 Doubles.

As the club started to grow our league became bigger and bigger. From a group of 32 players in 1980 we now have 72 players participating every Sunday from 1:30 to 4:30 PM on 10 courts, and from October to end of April every year since. It's interesting to note that thanks to this team concept our league can grow as big as we make it without increasing the number of teams. We still have 4 teams, however there are more matches now than we ever had before. Instead of 2 Singles and 3 Doubles we now have Singles and between 6 to 8 Men's Doubles, 10 Mixed Doubles. Our format varied from season to season depending on the response of the players. We did have Women' Singles and women's Doubles for a few seasons. This summer we have 144 players participating in the club first ever indoor summer team tennis program. The program has 6 divisions namely the 4.0 Men's Doubles the 3.5 Men's Doubles the 3.0 Men's Doubles the 4.0 Women's Double the Women' Single and the combo Mixed doubles. The more matches we added the more players we sign up. This turns out to be a great marketing idea that the club doesn't want to lose sight of.

Cedar Bluff Team Tennis is in its 25th season. I plan to keep it going as long as I still have fun and also as long as the players still enjoy the experience.