Tennis Scotland's Pilot of Thirty30 - Ongoing Feedback #1 - #5

05) Email received on August 16 2017 from John Brennan, Club President at Kinghorn Tennis Club, who organised a 12 person (mixed ability) round robin mixed doubles (changing partners) competition, using their 2 courts over the course of an afternoon, to trial Thirty30:

Further to a request from Tennis Scotland to trial the Thirty30 Tennis format, we held a Thirty30 Tennis competition last weekend and can feedback as follows:

We had 12 players participate, playing mixed doubles in a round robin format. It certainly focussed the mind in terms of being so quickly either game point up or down, and several pairings were beaten very convincingly. But we also found that you could recover quite quickly from perhaps being 0 - 5 down, so the ups and downs were on the whole quite even.

We expected to find a levelling of the playing field in terms of performance and results between the better and less able players, but surprisingly the better players who usually came out on top still came out on top in the Thirty30 format.

It was a fun and light-hearted event and everyone enjoyed the competition - perhaps it is something that we will include in our annual competitions calendar.

http://www.kinghorntennis.club/news

August Newsletter 17/8/2017

“And lastly, another congratulations to Kerry (Horsburgh) for winning the recent Thirty30 tournament for the ladies, and our President (John Brennan) for winning the men’s Thirty30 title. Well done to all of them!”

04) Email received on August 01 2017 from Alistair McLeod, Club Coach at Grantown on Spey Tennis Club:

"Tried it out a few times at junior and senior coaching and it has been very popular and encourages concentration."

03) Many thanks to the very progressive and open-to-new-ideas Scone Tennis Club who are the first club in Scotland to try out the Thirty30 Tennis scoring method.

Email received on July 27 2017 from Ian Hunter at Scone Tennis Club:

Scone Tennis Club used a variation of this for our last social event on Sunday.

Makes you have to focus!! Some of us not so good at that and clearly need practice!

As the players were of mixed standard it was not easy to deal with this score in the beginning!

We did not play a full match format, just 15 mins per round to vary the players with each other.

Certainly helped the lesser ability players get games on the board and they liked that.

www.sconetennisclub.org.uk has a comment and some photos from the afternoon.

Thanks.

A great afternoon’s tennis was had by all 16 members who turned up for the 23rd July Adult Social – what a good turnout in the middle of the holiday season! The sun blazed down and the tennis was hot too as we did a trial for Tennis Scotland of their new Thirty30 scoring set up. Each game is started with the score at 30 all, makes you concentrate and speed through the sets which was good for everyone mixing in and playing with and against different people all afternoon. See the Events page for more reporting and photos.

Events page:

23rd July Adult Social – Thirty30 Event - although it had rained heavily in previous days it cleared up at lunchtime and we had a large turn out of 16 people and a great afternoon’s social tennis – all in the sunshine! We tried out the new scoring set up of starting each game at 30 – 30 and found that it certainly did speed the game up but you had to keep concentrating as it was easy to lose after only 2 serves. Team players liked the way sets got completed and our more social players liked starting closer to winning the game!

02) Email received from Colin Bingham July 23 2017:

Perhaps check your spelling before you send emessages eg Pilot not as spelt in your leading message!

Incidentally love your idea!

Colin

Sorry Colin! "Pliot" was a typing error - Mark

01) Email received from George Cunningham July 21 2017:

Thanks for your reply. I can see you have put a lot of thought into this and it will achieve the aims you want ie shorter matches and enable perhaps older and less physically able players to compete in matches .

I don't see it as beneficial to young players because it denies players the ability to fight there way back into a game that with your scoring system could be over in less than a minute by two good serves, bad bounces or net cords. We have the first point after deuce system ,short sets and tiebreaks to reduce the time matches take. I have been playing club tennis at a good level for nearly 40 years and have always enjoyed the way the scoring of a tennis match allows for continual uncertainty and can change dramatically within a game. I just feel 2 points does not give enough scope.

This is only my opinion and I am sure you will have much support but it's not for me. I wish you well in your endeavour to promote your ideas.

Best regards

George Cunningham