We are ALTA City Champions, in more ways than one?

Even before the on-court competition started last Saturday, our ladies were busy putting the finishing touches on our table for the contest. Apparently, this is something everyone knew about except me. I told you that this was my first trip – as a captain or a player – to an ALTA City Final. If like me you’ve never been, you are supposed to decorate your “food table” in some theme (tennis, patriotic, etc.) and ALTA selects a winner, whose table then gets featured with a photograph in their magazine. I guess I’ve seen these before, but never realized it was a judged event, just thought “wasn’t that creative” when I saw the pictures.

In any case, I think – based upon the number of blue shirted ALTA officials (ladies) that stopped by to admire and photograph our spread – that we probably won that contest as well. Not sure when the winner is officially announced though; perhaps we have to wait until the next issue of Net News is published?

What a beautiful day it was. The sun was full in the sky and we all had to strip down from our winter gear; spring had sprung in all its glory. Plants blooming, seeds sprouting, and that's just what was happening on our festive table;-) Husbands, wives, teammates and their wives, parents, friends, a sibling, a boyfriend and a son turned out to support us.

On the courts, we ran into another opponent that put their best man at line 2 (I guess they’d have to play that way all season per the league’s sandbagging rules) but because of our depth, it didn’t matter. It just made all the other matchups favorable to us. Our line 1 & line 3 pairings won quickly, each finishing in under an hour. While the 3’s were finishing, our 4’s had just lost a tight first set in a tiebreaker, and my partner and I (line 5) took to the court. While our 4’s rebounded to take the second set, we won our first. Then it was much the same as our semi-final match the week before: both matches were in hand, the only question was who would finish first. This time our 4’s won while we were still two games away from finishing our match … and our team earned our neighborhood’s first City Championship!

I hope to have some pictures to update this posting with soon; perhaps this Thursday's blog entry will be nothing but photos from last Saturday.