The UGA women’s team can be summed up with one word: power. Also two secondary characterizations: flexibility, and malleability. Also, a triumvirate of observable nodes: intensity, humility, and volumes. These are in some sense confirmed, in some sense modified, by a tenuous quadrant of signature mannerisms: whacking, thwacking, negotiating, and the grunt.
LOCAL COLOR
Some chum was schlepping around a soggy bog of Zaxby’s, said wad rendered him talkative (but his commentary was corny).
SOMETHING ELSE
Players will mentally take themselves out of the match because of what they perceive to be a bad call. Sometimes these calls aren’t that bad or are even correct, but when they’re not correct and they are bad, something happens where the player can’t get over the complex of feelings having to do with the system not working, of a small but very significant injustice (these points reveal that the mental advantage of any match can shift over the course of a single point). What’s interesting isn’t whether calls are right, but how players allow the circumstances of single points to infect the remainder of their play: were they hoping for a reason to give up? Did the injustice do them the favor of having something outside themselves to point to for their loss? Is there more at stake in addressing one’s limits than in winning?
With all these questions in mind, I think of a certain tactic that can make a play on this part of the opposing player’s psyche. Sometimes a player will call a ball out in order to try and get away with it, in other words, to try and win that point. But what can also happen is, a player will call out a ball that they know is in, or is close, not just to try and win that point, but to get into the head of the opposing player. To make the player think that they are playing a cheater, that the integrity of the game they are playing is compromised, that whatever limit they think they are running up against is compounded with this dynamic of an unfair opponent and a system futile to stop such a stunt. An opponent that calls into question the nature of the game is at the mercy of the player who has so bought in that they’re willing to wager some part of themselves and their ethical makeup in the rules of the game.
Lott-mudd 