Um, Success?

For the past month and a half, I've been playing about two tennis matches a week for the "spring ladder" (fancy name, eh?) at a large public club in Denver. I started off at the number six position on this ladder. I won two matches, and climbed to number four. Then I lost six matches. Yes, six. It was a fast and furious plummet to the bottom, a swan dive to the depths of puff ball tennis and the death of my forehand. Some of the ladies I had close matches with, some of them were so pathetic I scarcely allow myself to remember them. Pretty much all of them were unathletic matches of who can hit the ball higher over the net with the least amount of pace. Well, that was the game my opponents played. The game I played was "launch it into the fence with great speed as quickly as possible in any given point."

Given this record, then, you can imagine my surprise when I got a call yesterday informing me that I made the end-of-the-ladder tournament. In fact, I'm the number four seed. Clearly, someone isn't doing their math. I don't know if my result is because I played more matches than anyone else (because if you don't play in a two-week period you move down), or because someone really likes the last name Beer, or what. When I called the tennis center back to register for the tournament, the man at the front desk asked if I'd been in the ladder before. I said no, and he said, "Oh, well congratulations on such a successful first attempt!" Um, yeah. Really successful. Success was definitely what I was feeling when I launched ball number 246 into the fence to pull off my final loss last week.

So, tomorrow I get to waltz onto the court as the number four seed in this tennis tournament, and hopefully atone for all my high-powered mistakes during the regular ladder season. I just came home from using the ball machine an hour ago, and my forehand had a glimmer of a return. In fact, as I was down on court four, the pro I take lessons from was on a break from teaching a cranky, immobile teenager on court one, and he hollered, "That's a very good job, Jenny Beer!" So maybe, just maybe...