1 boy and 1 girl, 4 matches, 55 minutes each, no time to waste.
Senior Caroline White and sophomore Ben Dinh participated separately in a special type of mixed doubles tournament at Pflugerville and Connelly High Schools Nov. 7.
Mixed doubles is a type of tennis where one boy and one girl go against another boy and girl. It can be one of the harder types of tennis, but not always.
“I had always considered mixed doubles intimidating because I believed the boys would always target the girls,” Ben said. “However, after participating in this tournament, I’ve come to realize that it’s not as scary as I had imagined.”
Something that made this tournament special is that each match was timed. Each team had 55 minutes to win as many games as possible. Usually tournaments are not timed and can take as long as needed, but to save time, the tournament directors put a time limit on each match. This was new to the team and created some tension between partners.
“At the tournament, [junior] Kirra [Hunter] and I weren’t doing well because it was my first time playing in a varsity tournament against varsity players and we were timed,” Ben said. “Our communication was poor, and we often got angry at each other. However, we soon realized that getting angry wasn’t productive; instead, we should learn from our mistakes. This realization led us to win our last two matches, which helped us both learn valuable lessons about communication and teamwork.”
Another unique feature of this tournament was that it was only mixed doubles. There were no singles (a type of tennis where one person goes against another) or doubles (a type of tennis with two of one gender on one side and two of the same gender on the other side) matches being played, only mixed doubles.
“When Coach Peiser informed us about this tournament, I was quite surprised because it was very different from our usual games,” Ben said. “Unlike our regular matches, this tournament had multiple mixed divisions and no singles or doubles. This Friday’s tournament was my first time playing mixed doubles in a tournament setting, and it completely transformed my perception of the sport.”
While it was Ben’s first time playing mixed doubles in a tournament, Caroline has played and become familiar with the in and outs of mixed doubles. Caroline played mixed doubles for some of her middle school career and most of her high school career.
“I have played in a mixed tournament before,” Caroline said. “I played the last two spring semesters with Clyde, a graduate, this last year. Coach [Kenneth] Peiser had put us together randomly my sophomore year, his junior year, and we ended up going really far in regionals these last two years.”
Peiser signed the team up and put partners together for this tournament. He has been the Lampasas high school’s tennis coach for over 20 years. Peiser has been picking partners for a long time, so he’s figured out a good system.
“So I picked the partners by determining which teams would do best for the entire team,” Peiser said. “I go in and pick the one doubles, two doubles and three doubles. Then it depends on how they pair up, how they like each other and how I can get six doubles and a mixed doubles to give us seven wins.”
Overall, Caroline and freshman Jack Allison won consolation (when players lose their first match and win the rest) and Ben and Kirra lost two and won two. Some of the other teams from Lampasas placed 1st, 2nd and 3rd.
“I was excited about playing with Jack, because we’ve been put together in practice but he’s always injured so I was never actually able to see if we would actually play good together,” Caroline said. “We played pretty good; we lost first round but we still played fairly good in that match, and then we had three more and won consolation against some good people.”
