Boss Mode: Five tips to be a model team captain

If there’s an unsung hero at the heart of recreational tennis in the U.S., it’s the league-team captain. Recruiting players, making schedules, reserving courts, putting together rosters, hoping your doubles teams don’t come to blows: these are just a few of the many duties that fall to a skipper.

It may not always be a fun job, but it’s an important one. The sport in this country would be in much poorer and less organized shape without the 60,000 people who volunteer their time, energy, and patience to captain a USTA league team. And it does come with at least one perk that any leader can appreciate.

“You can make sure things run as smoothly as possible, and everything is fair,” says Rebecca Rowland, who captains 4.0-level teams in Virginia.

If you’re thinking of taking on the task this season, or you’re an old hand looking for ways to manage the job a little better, here are five tips from a few experienced captains on both coasts.

1) "Know What Type of Party You’re Going to Throw"

That’s what Jeff O’Mara, a 3.0 and 3.5 player and captain from Seattle, says is the first thing you must decide when you’re putting together a league team. “Is it going to be a birthday party, an anniversary party, a wedding party?”

In tennis terms, that means you should make it clear if the team’s primary goal is to have fun, or to win. How seriously should players take their matches and their preparation, and how much playing time can they expect? These are often gray areas, and lead to hurt feelings later.

“When you’re there to have fun, then the team is probably going to be rotational, where everyone gets to play,” O’Mara says. “And when you’re there to be competitive, the best players will monopolize more of the courts.”

Rowland believes you can combine competitiveness with fun, as long as you keep them separate in your mind.

“I’m always out to win,” she says, “but I want it to be social, too. I try to give people the same playing time.

“Even if we lose, we’ll have some prosecco and talk about what happened afterward. Everyone seems to like that.”

2) Familiarize Yourself With the Rules

“The best tip I can give,” says Cathie Tiernan, who captains USTA teams in the Richmond, Va. area, “is to know the league rules.”

What do you do when someone is late for a match? Or one team doesn’t have enough players? When should you take a default, and when should make an effort to reschedule?

If you have a working knowledge of these questions and answers, you’ll reduce confusion and free up your teammates to just play tennis. And the more familiar you are with the rules, the more comfortable you’ll be negotiating with other captains. You can only make reasonable accommodations when you know what’s reasonable and unreasonable.

“Captains can take advantage,” says Tiernan, who keeps a copy of the rules in her tennis bag.

In this pandemic era, when virus protocols have added another layer of complexity to the game, it’s especially important to have someone who can make appropriate decisions.

“It seemed like there were a lot of grumpy people out there over the last year,” Rowland says, “and no one knew the rules.”

Rowland describes herself as a “big rule follower,” but sometimes even she can be caught off guard. Such as when she’s asked to referee a different match when she’s in the middle of one of her own.

“I was out there, and another player came onto my court and said that her opponent had just hit her with the ball,” Rowland says with a laugh. “I said, ‘I really can’t do anything about that right now.’”

The more familiar you are with the rules, the more comfortable you’ll be negotiating with other captains.

3) Make Everyone’s Lives Easier by Being Efficient

The USTA’s list of “VERY Important Captain Reminders” is two pages and more than 20 items long. From getting your team roster in by the deadline to making sure your players bring water to every match, there’s a lot to keep track of. So you should simplify your work processes any way you can.

“Logistics, so you don’t feel like you’re herding cats all the time, are a key part of being a captain,” says O’Mara, who recommends creating a Google Doc where you can post the schedule and the team line-ups, and have players confirm there. “You don’t want to deal with everyone on the team separately, and spend time chasing down all of their emails.”

Tiernan says doing things early and in an organized fashion can get players to feel like they’re part of something important.

“Put your line-up out several days before a match,” she says. “It lets players practice with their line-up partners, and gives you options for adjusting the line-up, without having to go into crisis mode if plans change.”

4) Find Creative Ways to Overcome Conflicts

The bane of many captains’ existence is dealing with players who don’t want to team up in doubles. Sometimes two players don’t get along; sometimes one player won’t play with another; sometimes there’s a player no one wants to play with.

“You get people who will say, ‘I’ll play with this person, but not that person,’” O’Mara says. “It’s like managing people in an office—you accommodate where you can, and try to put people together who will get along, because they’ll play better together, too.”

In the case of someone who no one wants to team up with—known in some precincts as “the grenade”—you might need to get creative.

“We had an unpopular guy who was more of a singles player, so we encouraged him to skip doubles, and just focus on singles,” one captain says. “We told him we really needed him there. But usually I could find a player willing to sit on the grenade. Usually a good dude who could put up with just about anybody.”

Overall, be thankful for your position.

“One of the good things about being a captain,” Tiernan says, “is that you get to choose who you play doubles with.”

5) Make It Feel Like a Team

“When you get bogged down in rules and technicalities, you’re missing the point,” O’Mara says, “You’re there to have fun and play tennis. League tennis is a fantastic social opportunity.”

Take any opportunity you can to bond. Go for group lessons and practices; go for dinner or drinks after matches; write a summary of each match and email it everyone the next morning. You can also find ways to show your appreciation for a player who goes above and beyond.

“So many of us want to play doubles, because singles makes us anxious,” Tiernan says. “So if someone agrees to play singles for me, I’ll make them a gift bag, with champagne—as long as they don’t drink it during the match.”

Tennis is an individual game, so it might take some time for players to get used to the idea that it can be a team game, too—and be so much better for it.