The Siebel Open will have the 2002 US Open finalists, Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras, and the U.S. Davis Cup team, with the USTA NorCal activities at the tournament starting on the very first day, Monday.

Monday, Feb. 10, is USTA "Buy One Get One Free Day," with a maximum of four tickets per card-carrying member. Actually, the offer is day or night for any price ticket. Siebel will host a hospitality room (in the Frank Jirik Room) for our members from 12 noon to 2 p.m. There is no volunteer reception by USTA NorCal at the Siebel this year.

In the afternoon, at San Jose State, the annual USTA/Wilson free Kids Clinic will be offered to an expected 300 youngsters from nearby neighborhoods and communities. In the past, a couple of ATP pros have attended to play a short exhibition and speak about their careers to the kids .

The youngsters will receive gratis tickets for the evening card, and Tournament Director Bill Rapp promises a "hot" evening match.

The ever-popular USTA NorCal Fast Serve Booth will be set up daily and will offer a special challenge. Over the period Monday-Thursday, the man and woman with the fastest recorded times will earn two tickets each at the time they enter a playoff for $250 cash. The booth's proceeds go to support junior tennis programs.

Nearby will be the USTA NorCal and MBNA booths. NorCal will have information about our programs. At the MBNA booth, signing up for a card means, with use, a certain number of dollars are turned back to NorCal programs.

On Wednesday, Feb. 12, the USTA NorCal Pathway Conference will be offered for the second consecutive year. The conference from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. will update USA Tennis programs, incentives, stipends and bonuses. A $20 fee includes lunch, raffle and a ticket to the afternoon matches. To pre-register, call Community Tennis at (510) 748-7344.

Kids Day is Valentines Day, Friday, Feb. 14. Members of the Community Tennis staff assist in this raucous morning tennis promotion that brings up to 4,000 school kids by bus to San Jose's HP Pavilion. Leading the morning's tennis hijinks will be the Jensen brothers, Barry MacKay and S.J. Sharkie.



In Mark Manning's family no official ceremony was complete without the wearing of the colorful regalia worn by his forebearers. This individual photo was taken at the time when the annual picture of all of the USTA's sectional presidents was taken in New York by photographer Russ Adams. Adams thought Manning had taken a wrong turn into the room. But the Oakland businessman and teaching pro assured him that he was the first African-American president of any section since the USTA formed on May 21, 1881. Manning finished his historic, albeit shortened, term of one year and now is officially the only African-American past president of any section.
Photo by Russ Adams Productions



The Northern California Tennis Hall of Fame has elected a Grand Slam doubles winner, a trail-blazing college coach, its first umpire and its first journalist.

Opening those envelopes we find Robin White, Bob Hansen, Joan Vormbaum and Bill Simons. All are well known for their accomplishments.

White was an outstanding San Jose junior who went on to win two doubles titles at the US Open in an 11-year pro career. Hansen started the tennis program at UC Santa Cruz and led teams to four NCAA victories. Vormbaum switched from soccer officiating to tennis and became a US Open chair umpire and an advocate for higher standards for officials. More than 20 years ago, Simons started Inside Tennis magazine, a free, Oakland-based publication that now publishes 250,000 copies 11 times a year and is outstanding in its field. Last year, Simons won a USTA print media award.

White learned tennis through Evelyn Herley's group lessons at age 7 at the San Jose YMCA. At Pioneer High School she played varsity tennis, basketball and softball and was senior class president.

The 5-41/2 inch blonde was a superb, quick-moving athlete. Her skills were polished with the help of teaching pro Rodney Kop as she climbed high in the rankings of all NorCal's age groups. She paused a year for college play at Pepperdine before turning pro in 1983. Although she reached a world singles rank of No.15 (winning two titles), doubles was her forte. She won 13 tournaments including the US Open Women's title with Gigi Fernandez in 1988 and the Mixed title in 1989 with Shelby Cannon, a young man she had never seen before the day they played their first match. She and Fernandez beat Martina Navratilova and Pam Shriver, the defending champions, in the semi-finals.

Hansen started the tennis teaching program at UC Santa Cruz in 1977 and got the campus to start a varsity squad three years later. In the process he had to convince the school to become a Division III NCAA school, which meant adding more sports. That done, Hansen won NCAA team titles in 1989-95-96-98. He was declared Coach of the Decade for the 1990s by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association.

"But it's all about the kids," says Hansen. "It's the relationships you form. I had just as much fun on the way up as I did being at the top. We had a 20-year reunion recently and it was wonderful. I am blessed to have this job."

Joan Vormbaum uneasily consented to umpire a match at the club in San Jose that she and her husband, Paul, had just joined. "I only knew soccer," she says. Five years later, she was in the chair at the US Open, before television cameras and thousands of spectators, as the umpire for the women's final between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert Lloyd. Needless to say, a lot had happened.

Vormbaum at once took tennis seriously, comparing its lax approaches with the tight, organized soccer structure in her native New York. She took every umpiring opportunity and got involved in fixing standards and training umpires.

Now she has officiated at 36 Grand Slam tournaments, 20 of them the US Open. Currently she is an ATP consultant on standards and procedures and travels widely.

When Simons laid out the first issue of Inside Tennis on his kitchen table, he was hoping Northern California was as hungry for more tennis news as he thought it was. He was right, despite the fact several other publishers told him the project was doomed from the start.

In Inside Tennis, Simons put a mix of international and local news, plus celebrity player interviews and the occasional offbeat feature. He maintained a knowledeagable staff and periodically spotlighted key USTA issues. And when he thought the name of the national USTA stadium in Flushing Meadow should be re-named to honor Arthur Ashe, he led a successful campaign to change it. The San Francisco Chronicle's Bruce Jenkins has called Inside Tennis the "best free (sports) publication in the nation."

For several years, USTA NorCal's newsletter pages ran in Inside Tennis. It now publishes our yearbook. Inside Tennis continues to be mailed free to our membership.

Captions:
Robin White (left) and Gigi Fernandez accepting the 1988 US Open Women's Doubles trophy.



The Man in the Chair

Mike Loo studied criminology at San Francisco City College and Sociology at San Francisco State University. But something happened to him on the way to the Forum - he became a globe-trotting, international tennis umpire. Loo trained in Northern California and now lives in Hawaii. Some may recognize this picture as the cover of the USTA Handbook for Rules and Regulations, Friend at Court.
Photo by Ed Goldman







A soft shoe may be music for the ears but it's painfully off-key for the feet.

Al Loosli will tell you to get rid of those softies no matter how cool they look. You need sturdy shoes that support your dashes to the sidelines and forward lurches for drop shots. Pros, he says, even put on a new pair every match!

Loosli is a Bay Area doctor who is a rehabilitation and sports medicine expert, the first in a strong line-up of guest speakers at the all-day USTA NorCal's Annual Meeting at the ClubSport Pleasanton in November.

Early birds paid $25 for the day session that included a continental breakfast and lunch and featured the speakers, a panel discussion on tennis programs and court time at the club. In the late afternoon, the Annual Meeting itself elected a slate of new directors to fill out the 17-member board.

The evening session, at $35, included dinner, an awards presentation and Casino Night where players "gambled" with free playing chips for prizes. It was attended by about 150, including USTA national Community Tennis director Pat Freebody and USTA vice president Franklin Johnson.

The presentations honored USA Junior teams that had won the NorCal Regional Playoffs in the 2002 season, the teams in Adult League that finished in the top four at the nationals and our two Senior League national winners. Additionally honored were NTRP Grand Prix winners, junior Players of the Year and Sportsmanship winners, MPC Award winners (presented earlier in the fall) and the evening's newly announced Community Tennis, USTA NorCal, and President's Awards given by out-going president Mark Manning.

Loosli's morning address included gems of wisdom on tendinitis, travel (it's a pain in the neck), tennis elbow and the "megaton" impact of Vioxx. He told a roomful of early birds what your pain leads to (weakness), how to deal with it and how to avoid it.

"Will anti-inflammatories affect your response time on court?" inquired one player.

"Not if you take them at night," Loosli said, then went on to demonstrate how to exercise with a 21/2 pound weight to avoid tennis elbow.

The other speakers were sports psychologist and 2001's leading world's 35s player Jeff Greenwald, sports camp CEO Charlie Hoeveler and architect and club owner Larry Dodge. In turn, each expert discussed the player's mind, choosing a playing camp, and desirable facilities.

Captions:
Top to Bottom
1. Al Loosli

2. It was a buffet for one and all before the awards began

3. Steve Cornell (right) accepts the Club of the Year award for the Berkeley Tennis Club from Mark Manning.

4. Larry Dodge explaining a point to Alan Criswell

5. Jeff Greenwald

6. Family of the Year with Bruce Hunt and Mark Manning


Our system of voting for our board of directors is an old one and quite similar to what other USTA sections in the West have. The voting by-law was written in 1953, before there were individual members of the USTA.

Individuals, per se, do not vote at the USTA NorCal Annual Meeting. Organizations do. This is not to say that individuals don't have influence. They do. They can make their desires known to their member organizations. NorCal has more than 400 such organizations, made up primarily of private clubs, public community tennis associations, recreation agencies and schools.

Those organizations are represented at the Annual Meeting by individuals, named as proxy holders by the organizations. Approximately one month before the Annual Meeting, each member organization is mailed a notice of the business to come before the meeting, along with a proxy form. An individual can have a role in our annual meeting simply by soliciting proxies from his or her own member organization and others.

Typically, most member organizations ignore the notice and the proxy form unless a candidate for the Board, or a proponent for or against a proposed by-law amendment, contacts the organization soliciting the proxy.

By-laws require that our Annual Meeting be held during the fourth calendar quarter. It has been held during November the last 20 years. We encourage more participation.




Fresno Bee sports writer Ken Robison won a special USTA media commendation for his excellent news and feature coverage of tennis in the Bee. In 2001, his story on a gutsy winning team of Latino youths from Tranquility High School, headlined Heartstrings, made front page. Robison continues to bring tennis front and center for the public. The award was presented by staffer Marian Thomson in September at the Pro-Am Sponsors dinner during the Fresno men's and women's dual Challengers at Copper River Country Club. Robison (left) is with tournament director Neil Castro.




Who Wins that 10-pointer? USTA NorCal recently completed an interesting study of who wins a league match after opponents split sets. Looking at 2001 results from Adult men's and women's, Mixed, Senior and Super Senior leagues, the winner of the first set won the third set and match 49.2 per cent of the time. In 2000, it was 50.2 per cent of the time. In 1999, it was 49.8 per cent. Then the 2002 results were examined from the first leagues to employ the Super 10-point tiebreak, i.e., Combo, 50 Mixed, Senior and Super Senior. It was found that the winner of the first set won the Super tiebreak 51.2 per cent of the time.

Tennis ranks seventh in intercollegiate programs, ahead of golf. According to College Sports Connect@, an online database featuring data for more than 2,000 U.S. and Canadian colleges, the list of sports programs offered by U.S. two- and four-year colleges is headed by basketball with 1,897. The rest of top ten: 2. Volleyball, 1,654, 3. Baseball, 1,539, 4. Softball, 1,492, 5. Soccer, 1,454, 6. Cross country, 1,267, 7. Tennis, 1,248, 8. Golf, 1,200, 9. Track & field, 930, 10. Football, 814.