It’s Tennis (with a Twist)!

BY LESLIE SHIPP

Anne Pham bounces a tennis ball on the ground. The score in her singles set is 0-2. She looks across the court at her captain, Michael Boyer.

“Hey, I’m ready to come out whenever,” she declares.

“No, you gotta stay in,” Boyer says.

Pham had already played several sets of singles over the previous two days for her team, the Poachaholics, during this July 2022 Impact Team Tennis competition.

Impact Team Tennis is a fast-paced, co-ed tennis format played by teams organized into leagues. There are six sets in total: one set each for men’s and women’s doubles, one each for men’s and women’s singles and two mixed sets.

Teammates on the bench can substitute into a match at any time. Two courts are used to play matches concurrently, and teammates gather in the space between the courts. Unlike other forms of tennis that insist on silence, ITT encourages coaching and cheering from the sidelines.

Without a sub, Pham returned to the round and evened the score 2-2, while the temperature at the Copper Tennis Center in Springfield, Missouri, hit 105.

To compete in a Regional Qualifier, a team must win a local tournament, unless it’s a Seniors or Super Seniors team. Players on Seniors teams are between 50 and 59 years old, while players 60+ are Super Seniors. Both groups advance directly to Regionals.

During the brief pauses in her Regional, Pham glanced over to the adjacent court, where the men’s singles raged on.

As she switched sides for the changeover, Pham asked her teammates, “Hey, it’s an even playing field now. Does somebody else want to come in for me?”

“Are you still good?” Boyer asked. “Are you going to pass out?”

“No, I’m not going to pass out,” she reassured him.

Pham’s teammates handed her a chilled damp towel from an ice chest, which she wrapped around her neck. Singles can be a lonely head-game, so her teammates began to offer her some advice. Sometimes you need a reminder to focus on what’s in front of you, Pham said.

Over the next two rounds, Pham fell behind again, 2-4. But she decided not to ask for a sub, because she didn’t want a teammate to have to start from two points down. Instead she rallied, bringing the score to an even 5-5.

The set went to a tiebreaker, in which the first to five wins. After six rounds, Pham wasdown again, 2-4. One missed shot, and the game would be over.

“Anne is just a brick wall,” said Joel Heil, one of her teammates. “She gets everything back.”

Pham scored the next three points in the tiebreaker, winning her set. The Poachaholics director at Life Time, compared ITT’s atmosphere to a college game.

“Everyone is on the court cheering, cheering, cheering,” Bliss said.

Genesis coordinator Lynette Brown said that players like ITT’s format and atmosphere because it’s more flexible and less formal than other tennis leagues.

“The format allows for asking questions, getting input from other people, stopping play and discussing situations,” Brown said. “People are less intimidated to play once you tell them you can coach and cheer.” would go on to win that match and three others, clinching victory at the ITT Regional Qualifier.

Pham’s teammate Heil, who played for United States Tennis Association (USTA) club tennis at Iowa State University, likes the breakneck fever of ITT.

“The best part about the format is the intensity of playing one set. You have to play well right off the bat,” Heil said.

There are two groups that organize ITT leagues and tournaments in Iowa: Genesis Health Clubs in Des Moines, and Life Time Athletic in Urbandale. Pham plays at Genesis, and the connection she feels with her teammates is as important as the tennis.

Faith Bliss, the league pro tournament

ITT players use the USTA rating system to form teams. Players are ranked from 1 to 7 in half-number increments, with a pro player rating a 7.

Unlike traditional tennis, the score of each game adds up to the team’s total score. That every game matters and all team members contribute is a fundamental principle for ITT. Jennifer Smith, its director of tournaments, said this is derived from World Team Tennis

(WTT) co-founder Billie Jean King’s belief in gender equality.

King is probably best remembered for 1973’s “Battle of the Sexes” tennis event. King, then the world No. 1 female tennis player, played the 55-year-old former men’s champion Bobby Riggs, a self-proclaimed “male chauvinist pig” who believed no woman was capable of defeating a decent male player. King disproved that, thoroughly beating Riggs.

ITT encourages “men and women competing together on a team, and both genders making equal contributions to the result of the match,” Smith explained.

This scoring format, where every game counts towards the team score, upends traditional tennis strategies, which focus on players winning two out of three sets to win a match.

“Everything is around the team score,” said Justin Despotovich, a Poachaholic team member.

When Pham was down in one of her singles sets at Regionals, she could see her teammate, Tim Paulson, was winning his set. She lost 0-6, but Paulson won 6-1, so the net loss was one game. The two doubles sets were close, so winning came down to the mixed sets.

“You have to be really good at mixed because there are two courts of that,” Despotovich said.

Pham knew their mixed teams were strong, so that took some of the sting out of her singles set loss. As she expected, the Poachaholics won both their mixed sets.

“There is more strategy,” Despotovich said. “You might have one really good court of men’s singles, but it takes five other sets to win the match.”

Heil cited one more way ITT differs from traditional tennis: a team is never out of the match.

“You can come back from 10 games down,” he said. “There is the added pressure of knowing that when you are ahead, you still have to play well.”

Karin Beschen plays on Team Christie in the tournament organized by Genesis. She previously took clinics at the club and wanted to find match opportunities. Beschen formed a team along with friends from one of the clinics.

“I was curious about it and just liked the idea of tennis with a twist,” she said.

Team Christie won a division competition for teams with an overall ranking of 3.0. The team had never played together in a tournament, but camaraderie, trust and support gave them an edge, according to Beschen. Once they started to win, the cheering pumped them up. Team Christie won all three of their matches, Beschen played every set.

“I was so happy,” she said. “It felt like I had just won Miss America!”

Some teams just play for fun. Faith Bliss played on a team where everyone took a couple games of singles, helping alleviate the age-old issue of who is playing singles.

“The most important thing on my team, I always have someone to play singles,” said Genesis’ Lynette Brown, who also played on a team.

But other teams plan carefully and extensively. Michael Boyer, the mastermind behind the Poachaholics’s team captain, is their strategist.

“You are trying to find people you are friends with and trying to find the best players at certain levels,” he said. “The ideal situation is to have everyone at the top of their level.”

All players have to know their roles.

“[A] key is to find players who won’t be offended when they get subbed out,” Despotovich said. “They have to have a mentality that it is not personal. You have to find the hot hand right now. Or a match up against who you are playing against.”

Pham appreciates Boyer’s coaching.

“Having a good coach is one of the markers of how successful the team is going to be,” she said. “I knew he wasn’t going to take me out even if I was losing 0-4 because he had a plan.”

Sometimes others do the coaching. During one changeover when Pham was down, Despotovich talked with her.

“Justin kind of holds you with his comments,” she said.

A few months after winning the Springfield Regional, Pham and the rest of the Poachaholics won the ITT 4.0 National Championship in Orlando, Florida.

A Super Seniors 4.0 team with two members from Iowa, Dawn Ver Steeg and Dennis Lonzarich, also took home a national title. Other members of their team were from San Diego and New Jersey.

Genesis will have an eight-week summer league in 2023. Life Time hopes to have a tournament in late spring or early summer. Winners of these events may attend one of the regionals being held across the country, in locations ranging from Raleigh, North Carolina to Scottsdale, Arizona.

Jennifer Smith said there are plans for pickleball using the same format. Whether its pickleball or tennis, her favorite part of ITT is watching players have fun and develop new bonds of friendship, and in some cases, even more.

“We have even had players who have met for the first time while playing our format get married!” she said.