Susie Dunn

It’s about time we pay due recognition to one of our very dedicated Cottonwood tennis volunteers. He has been so faithfully taking action shots at all our tournaments throughout the tennis season as well as taking beautiful photographs of our tennis couples each December at our very popular and fun filled Tennis Christmas Dinner Dances.

This person is none other than our John Langan. He has a very special camera, the Pentax Model K10D, which captures our images like no other. He recently photographed all 190 people that attended our Cottonwood Tennis Dinner Dance on December 7. Our members can view these pictures at our Cottonwoodtennisclub.com website and see his artistic work. Thanks John for your dedication and a great job.

Back to the courts: The end of November and the month of December is a very busy time for tournaments. In addition to both our regular organized and league play for men and women, Bob Lewis, our tournament director and his assistants, Rae Lewis, Rob and Kathryn Campbell have their hands full.

After the Bradshaw, we got right into our Leisure World Social at their state of the art facility on eight brand new tennis courts. Everyone remarked how beautiful they were. We ended up coming away winners with scores of 78 to 44.

December 1-4 began our competitive Triple T Tournament where players were divided into four different colored teams playing for four days from 8:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. on all five courts. This year our last day of matches was canceled by the correct weather forecast of rain. This shortened our play days down to three and therefore there was no chance to catch up to the Orange team. They came out the big winners with 55 wins, the Green team had 36 wins, the Red team had 34 wins and lastly, the Blue team had only 26 wins.

Our next scheduled social with Sun Lakes has been changed to March 7. Make that change on your calendars. On December 20 we headed over to SunBird for our second interclub social with that club. Results will be reported next month.

Tennis tip of the month: When you start your warm up each time you play, warm up your hand eye coordination, not just your muscles. Make it your goal to hit the sweet spot on the racket with your very first striking of the ball in the warm up and the very first striking of the ball for the match (per Al Wagner- CWT coach).