One of the most fulfilling aspects of following a sport is dissecting the games in all their glorious minutiae. Over a couple beers, you can hotly debate an offside call in football or a called strike in baseball. Soccer fans get into weekly verbal throw-downs over whether a player was fouled, or dove, in the penalty box. Tennis has no shortage of talking points, either. At this year’s U.S. Open, we were reminded of two of them: when is it appropriate to call a foot fault, and are the players taking too long to challenge calls?

Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images During the U.S. Open final, Federer griped both about the time it took del Potro to challenge and about Hawk-Eye missing the mark.

Hawk-Eye, the technology that tells you if a ball was in or out, works well and is widely accepted by anyone on tour not named Roger. But the challenge system, which governs the use of Hawk-Eye, has developed a couple of holes.

When instant replay was introduced, it was meant to quickly eliminate controversy and snuff out Johnny Mac-style tirades. If a player thinks the ball is out, he should challenge the call almost immediately after the point ends. While nothing about timing was written into the rulebook, it was the clear and desired protocol.

Ah, give the players a second, they’ll take many, many more.

These days when there’s a disputed call, fans are made witness to a protracted decision-making process—should I, or shouldn’t I, challenge—that has all the drama of Booknotes on CSPAN. First, the deliberate walk toward the net to get a better look at the call in question, which if you’re Juan Martin del Potro seems to take minutes, not seconds. Next, squinting to find the exact mark, no small feat if the surface is a hard court. Then the player inevitably flashes a quizzical look at the umpire, asking if the chair saw the ball in or out. Almost never satisfied with the umpire’s response (what player wants to hear that the ref saw his shot way, way out), the player glances over to his coach to ask him if he should request a review. Finally, once the coach gives the green light, the player challenges the call.

This game interruption is brought to you by Ambien.

There are, of course, two problems with this all too frequent scenario. Most obviously, it takes too long and sucks the life out of a match. According to a spokesperson at the USTA, the amount of time a player gets to mull over a challenge is up to the discretion of the chair umpire. Is it too much to ask for the umpires to speed things up and to reiterate to the players that they must challenge seconds after the call, and not accept a challenge after, say, five seconds?
 
The other issue is that the players should not be asking their coaches for advice. This, as Mary Carillo pointed out during one particularly conspicuous dialogue between a player and coach, is illegal coaching. Navigating the challenge system to make sure you don’t run out of challenges in each set has become a part of the game’s strategy. If it’s not proper for coaches to tell their players to, say, hit more forehands down the line, they should be prohibited from telling their charges what to do on close calls. And they are, well, sort of doing that.

According to the Grand Slam rulebook, communication of any kind, audible or visible, between a player and coach may be construed as coaching. May be—therein lies the rub. Any rational person would construe what’s been going on as a form of coaching. But enforcement of the rule is left up to the discretion of the umpire. (Requests to get a definitive statement from the ITF were met with radio silence.)

You can’t blame the players for taking competitive advantage of a situation. It’s simply time for the umpires to regain control of the matches and let the players know who’s boss.

James Martin is the editor-in-chief of TENNIS. Follow him on Twitter.