Net-Working : Myers Helping Women Learn the Strategy, Improve Their Game at His Ongoing Summer Tennis Camps

The court is scorching, brows are dripping and patience, by all accounts, should be thinning.

But the free-flowing stream of encouraging words quickly replenishes what has been depleted through repeated drilling and shot making.

Listening to tennis professional Randy Myers is an ear-numbing experience. Myers, 38, in his 18th year of teaching the game, sees nothing golden about silence.

“There’s no such thing as hogging the ball,” he yells to Linda Quinn.

“That’s your buddy. Work with her, work with her,” he orders Patty Giesea.

“Go, go, go. Good. That’s bea-u-ti-ful,” he roars to Melinda Elliott.

“Way to turn, way to meet the ball, way to watch the ball,” he applauds Jerrie Olson.

That’s a short sampling of a typical camp day under Myers’ tutelage. By the time he hands out T-shirts that brag, “I survived Randy Myers’ tennis camp,” his students have earned them.

For four consecutive hours on five consecutive days, Myers conducts a tennis camp that caters to the doubles game, specifically, to dozens of women who play doubles in the county-wide Hill & Harbor League.

But the women, and there are many, who enroll in his ongoing summer camps, swear by his teaching methods.

“This is my third summer,” said Tustin’s Elliott. “Even though it’s basically the same camp every year, you pick up different tips each time.”

Elliott, who plays on a C-2 level team at Tustin Hills, made a grip change on her backhand volley after her recent camp experience and is delighted with the results.

“It’s something so slight, but it has made all the difference,” she said. “It was worth the whole (camp).”

Lynn Frankel, another Tustin Hills player, has attended Myers’ camps for several years and will return later this month.

“I love it,” she said. “It’s good for strategy and strokes. It can be a refresher course if you already know something, or bring out something new you might not.”

The approximately 2,200 women who form Hill & Harbor have learned that summer is an opportune time to develop or improve their games.

With the season finale one month past and the season opener less than two months away, now’s the time to perfect that mid-court chip shot they would never dream of trying during the regular season.

“They want to improve something in practice so they can try it in a match,” said Myers, an Orange Coast College and UC Irvine graduate who started the program seven years ago, after a group of women asked him for some doubles-only instruction.

“The camp filled up by word of mouth,” he said.

Myers teaches out of the Costa Mesa Tennis Club. Of his 46 hours a week in lessons, 20, with up to 75 people, are reserved for Hill & Harbor members.

Myers is on the court up to 12 hours a day during the summer. But catch him morning, noon or night, and he’s running at full throttle.

“He’s so different from any instructor I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a lot,” said Laguna Hills’ Sue Kozek. “He gets you so excited, he’s so energized.”

Myers believes he has to exude twice the energy to get the effort he knows his students are capable of.

“You have to have them like it,” he said. “You have to have 100% more energy then they have, to bring their energy level up.”

Many women in the league started tennis later in life, which Myers says paves the way for vast improvement.

“I treat them as if they have the ability to be a top-ranked junior,” he said. “I don’t let them feel terrible about any lack of skill.”

Frankel, 46, started playing tennis after the birth of her second son, 20 years ago. After dabbling in the sport for 15 years, she took it up seriously five years ago.

“Randy has a gift of communication,” she said. “He’s gotten me so enthusiastic. I’ve reached a confidence level I didn’t have before. I can’t always execute perfectly, but the decisions I make are right.”

For many of the women in their 40s, 50s and up, the idea of flexing their muscles was a distasteful thought at first.

“Girls my age, we didn’t do sports,” said Elliott, 53. “Our moms told us if we perspired, to stop until it went away. We didn’t know how to compete, how to line call, how to keep score.”

They’re making up for lost time. Myers described many of the women from the league as fierce competitors who don’t see themselves as such, yet.

“Some girls play for different reasons,” Myers said. (He refers to the women as girls, a description they don’t seem to mind.) “A lot of them don’t think they’re competitive, but they are. First, they have fun. But what I try to teach is just because it’s competitive doesn’t mean you have to grimace.”

Paddy Speyers, now of Big Bear Lake, started the league in 1970 and smiles when she talks about its progression.

Speyers had arranged several exchange matches for women at the Newport Beach Tennis Club back then, when she got the idea that a league similar to one she belonged to in New Jersey could work here.

Initially, she started with nine clubs that competed on the B and C levels. But the teams filled up rapidly and 14 clubs were active a year later.

By the mid-’70s, the D level was added and in 1980, the senior division was started.

Today, in its 23rd year, there are approximately 50 participating clubs from Los Alamitos to San Clemente.

There are roughly 160 teams--with 16 teams to a division and a minimum of eight players and maximum of 16 to a team--competing in the A, B, C, D and seniors divisions, with sub-divisions among the lettered levels.

The season runs weekdays from September to June. Teams practice once a week, play challenge matches once a week and play another club once a week.

Each team pays a $100 fee to participate, and some clubs charge additional fees, which vary.

At the end of the 30-match season, players gather for an awards luncheon, where trophies and tennis charms are awarded the winning teams.

Speyers, who moved to the mountains eight years ago, isn’t surprised the league has survived and has a waiting list, even in tough economic times.

“I’m glad it’s continued to grow and welcome new people,” she said.

Speyers arrived at the name Hill & Harbor because of the locale of the founding clubs.

“Some were in the hills, some were in the beach towns and we just decided to call it that,” she said.

As the league has expanded, the level of competition has kept pace.

Elliott said there’s no comparing a D-level player 15 years ago to today.

“A B-1 then would have trouble making it as a D-2 today,” she said. “It’s extremely competitive.”

Although healthy in size and quality, the organization has its flaws.

Some women joked that nicknames such as the “Hell & Hatred League” have evolved because of the competitive lengths some women will go to, to ensure victory for their team or to improve their standing on their own team.

“Some people complain because there are a lot of rules,” Frankel said.

Said Huntington Beach’s Marie Keefe, who plays in the league because it allows her to keeps her weekends free: “It can get pretty nasty because everyone wants to play.”

For that reason, some tennis folks who are indirectly involved with the league believe it’s time to revamp the system.

“They need to update it, make it user-friendly to someone just coming in,” said Allan Iverson, assistant manager at the Racquet Club of Irvine. “There’s no definite guidelines to determine who is a C-1 or a C-3 player. Back in the ‘70s that worked, but now it doesn’t.”

Iverson said the Irvine club in hoping to introduce some ideas to the league such as how to run a ladder--where players challenge each other for a better position on the team--without so much infighting.

But overall, he said the league is a boost to the club and offers a quality product at a reasonable cost.

“Hey, if I wasn’t working during the week, I’d do it too.”