Sunday, October 12, 2008

PSC vs Hat Yai Municipality Tennis Club - Freddy Choong Cup

We were delighted that the folks from Hat Yai could come and visit us this year. Last year they had to postpone because of the elections and so forth... Mostly we were delighted because it means now we can go to Hat Yai next year....or next week!

The Hat Yai Team was captained by Colonel Soonthong but their true Patriarch is General Pingphang . Myself and KL Tan played a VIP friendly against the still strong 82 year old General Pingphang and his partner. We won by a nose 9 - 7...

The score of the Cup match was 5 - 2 but that scoreline doesn't show the anxiety that our Captain experienced when 4 of our top pairs started out losing...

EC and Datin Lau MA were down 1 - 7 , Robert and Sasaki were down , Lisa and Keiko were losing, as were Albert and Soon Hong...
Luckily Robert and Sasaki pulled thru in a tie break and we were all stunned to see Datin carry the balls off the court, indicating they miraculously recovered and also won by tie break!

Jim Arthur and Jimmy Boon sailed thru their match 9 - 0 and Koay and Chee also won as did Naidu and Paul Lim...

After having narrowly escaped disaster... we began to relax as the beer began to flow and our visitors enjoyed a nice buffet dinner with plenty of food, beer and karaoke.
We certainly look forward to visiting Hat Yai next year.... or next week!

To see more photos of this event, click here

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Courts 1 - 4 are OPEN!

Our resurfacing project for courts 1 - 4 was completed on 25 September 2008 and the courts are once again open for members to play. As you can see from this photo, we decided to go with dark green courts, a light green outer court and white lines... This makes it quite a bit easier to make line calls when the yellow ball strikes the white line, unlike the yellow lines on our old courts.

The courts are new and 19 mm thick, so the first thing you notice is that they feel very much more "cushiony" and comfortable to your joints than our old courts which have worn down to around 5 mm and now feel almost like hard courts. This difference in thickness , as well as the fresh sand dressing, makes a slow ball sit up a bit more... so you have plenty of time to hit it... thus, you may describe this surface behaviour as "slow"... However, the material has a lower coefficient of friction than the old courts, and if you whack a serve or a strong shot with a lot of pace, the ball will "shoot" ...the surface can be surprisingly fast and grass-like in that situation... Also, you can "slide" quite well on these courts, even though they are brand new and yet to be "broken in".


Before we laid the new courts, I was a bit concerned about this "slippery-ness" when playing on the courts when they are wet, but I played in the rain yesterday and was delighted to find the footing to be very sure and I had absolutely no sense of it being too slippery or dangerous to play on when wet. Only effect was slightly more tendency of the ball to shoot as described above...


The other thing I was delighted to see was that the ponding situation has been improved immensely on courts 1 - 4... During yesterday's heavy rain, courts 1 - 4 were still playable with very little ponding, while courts 5 - 8 were completely flooded... The only thing i noticed about the new courts is that they have a slight tendancy to trap air and form sort of a blister or bubble underneath...but this is not dangerous, and it quickly disappears about the same time the court drains completely. Finally, members should be aware that the sand dressing will be an ongoing process. The heavy rains recently will distribute the sand unevenly... We are aware of this and have scheduled the next round of sand dressing for 15 Oct 2008. This will be done during the day and should not affect your club nite play...

Come out and have a hit on the new courts and tell me what you think of them... I'll be delighted to hear your comments!

PSC vs CRC Taiping

As part of the annual series of games, we hosted CRC Taiping for tennis on 27 Sept 2008. Our Wong Poh Lam was our Captain of the day for this event... The CRC Taiping team was a bit short handed... so we were gifted two walkovers ... We lost in our first pair, and our mixed doubles pair...but we went on to win the rest of the matches for a final score of 5 - 2.