Tennis League San Diego Endorse Thirty30 Tennis as their "go-to" Match Shortening Format

Last weekend, Steve de la Torre, Owner/Director of Tennis League San Diego, San Diego, California (https://www.tennisleague.com/) sent the letter below to all Tennis League San Diego Members and also copied it to their Facebook page.

(Tennis League San Diego has been on the go for 29 continuous years and has almost 200 player/members across 4 skill levels.)

Letter to All Tennis League San Diego Members:

We love tennis!

However, one of the challenges for many of us has been the time needed to play a 3 set match.

They can regularly go 3 hours plus.

Personally, as much as I love the game, that's just more time than I want to dedicate to a match.

It's also a challenge on other levels.

One big one is holding a court that long.

In many cases, you can't, which means you can't finish your match.

Another factor is injury.

Not only does the quality of the play start to degrade after 2 plus hours, but the chance of injury escalates exponentially.

Keep in mind, the following is being presented only as an alternative.

Many of you will prefer to play Tennis League's traditional "best of 3 sets" option, and that is OK.

However, more and more of you will find "Thirty30" scoring to be a really good scoring format that will help you keep league matches within a manageable time frame.

While there are several options for shortening matches, far and away, I think the best is "Thirty30" scoring.

Yesterday, my partner and I played a 3 set match using that scoring system in 1 hour, 10 minutes.

Generally, you can play 3 sets in about an hour.

Repeated deuce/ad games can lengthen it somewhat.

(If really pressed for time, even that can be addressed by playing sudden death, game point at deuce.)

How does it work? Easy.

Every game starts at 30-all and gets played out as usual from there.

Other aspects:

1) Change sides after first 2 games,

2) Continue changing sides every 4 games after that,

3) 9-point tiebreaker at 6 games all (first to 5 points), sudden death at 4 points all,

4) Players alternate person who serves first every set.

League match scores get entered as usual.

Here's a link to the complete set of rules.

https://www.thirty30tennis.com/rules

For league purposes... should you want to play a match using Thirty30 scoring, please make sure you and your opponent agree on it beforehand.

Thirty30 Tennis Comment

It will be interesting to hear in the coming months the various experiences of the players of using the shorter Thirty30 scoring format.