Tennis / Chris J. Parker : Players Hoping to Climb Ladder Benefit From SCTC Tournaments
The greatest tennis player of all time? Debate rages, but anyone’s top-10 list would include Donald Budge, the first grand-slam winner, Jack Kramer, Pancho Gonzalez, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe.
Ron McCabe, the director of the Southern California Tennis Club, avoids that debate but offers another challenge. What’s the greatest organization in the history of the sport? Don’t bother debating. McCabe has a ready answer: His own.
“We have the most active club-ladder program in the history of tennis,” he said.
McCabe is just warming up.
“I say that very boldly, but we’ve had 10,000 completed matches. It is the most effective networking source for the competitive, improvement-minded player anywhere on the face of the planet,” he said.
The SCTC, founded in 1980 and located in Studio City, has awarded more than $90,000 in tournament prizes since its inception. The club has two types of tournaments--the ladder program, with different branches in Southern California, including Glendale, the San Fernando Valley, the Santa Clarita Valley and Ventura County, plus the round-robin tournaments the club sponsors each weekend.
“We’re geared toward the competitive player rather than the social player,” McCabe said. “But a player doesn’t have to be good to play with us. He or she just has to be improvement-minded.”
This weekend’s round-robin tournament is scheduled at the Scholl Canyon Golf and Tennis Complex in Glendale for doubles teams at the A and C level. Participants play in three to six matches. Next week’s tournament at Lakewood features singles competition.
“There’s a great variety of competition in the tournaments,” McCabe said. “They are designed to be high-pressured, to help leather players up for competition.”
In addition to the weekly tournaments, the SCTC organizes three, two-month tournaments--a spring singles tournament, a summer doubles tournament that concludes Aug. 28, and the K-Swiss singles tournament that begins Sept. 10.
The K-Swiss tournament, which runs until Nov. 10, has five different divisions for men and women. The application deadline is Aug. 15.
Information: (818) 769-4646.
Tournament time: Its director calls it the “oldest, most distinguished amateur tennis tournament in the country,” but what sets the national public parks tennis championships apart is its commitment to tennis players in wheelchairs.
The opening ceremonies of the 62nd annual event, which begins Sunday at 5 p.m. at the Ambassador College Tennis Stadium in Pasadena, feature a wheelchair tennis exhibition staged by the nation’s top-ranked men’s (Brad Parks) and women’s (Chantal Vandierendonck) wheelchair players.
The weeklong tournament offers play in men’s and women’s open, doubles and 30-and-over divisions at four locations in Pasadena and Glendale. Previous divisional winners of the tournament include three-time winner Tracy Austin, Pancho Gonzalez and Chris Evert.
In addition, a field of nearly 50 players will compete in the wheelchair division.
Information: (818) 797-1114.
Where-are-they-now dept.: Larry Pearl, the No. 1 singles player at Taft from 1984 to 1986, was named an All-Southwest Conference singles player for Rice University this season.
Pearl, a sophomore, was the Owls’ No. 4 singles player. At Taft, Pearl posted second- and third-place finishes in the City Section 4-A Division finals.