Haha, this is awesome! I play at fairly low level (roughly equivalent to USTA 3.0/3.5) mens and mixed doubles and I WISH our warmups could look half this good or be half this useful. What happens in these ALTA matches is that they're all doubles, and usually you have as many as 5 lines (4 for seniors) all scheduled to play the same day. Each facility is required to have a minimum of 2 courts, and most only have that, so it means that lines 3 and 4 are often waiting around for a long time before they even step onto the courts - with line 5 players often waiting even longer. It is often not feasible for people to have any sort of extra courts to go and rally around on while waiting for their match to start and we try to have people arrive for the match at staggered times, but if a match goes long, or several matches go long, that results in players sitting for sometimes hours before getting out on the courts. Sometimes during the Winter and early Spring seasons, it's dang cold even in Georgia (we played a match at 37 degrees F this season already) and sitting around for all that time is just brutal. Anyway, so then, you get a supposed 10 minutes for warmup... let me tell you what that looks like at ALTA B-5 to B-8 level:
Sometimes we start with a minute or so of mini-tennis, but not always. Then (because it's doubles), players pair off and use one half of the court for the opening rallying, and let me just tell you - this is a complete sh*tshow. These are players, (myself often included) that are often unable to have more than a 5 shot rally. So these players who have been sitting for hours now have to loosen up full court ground strokes and only utilize half of the width of the court to do so, AND they only open one can of balls to start the match, so one pair has 2 the other has 1. Invariably the players hit wild warmup shots into the other side where the other pair is trying to keep their rally going. You can imagine, the majority of this time spent during "warm up" is warming up by chasing balls and apologizing to the neighboring court (where a match may be ongoing) for interrupting them... so your legs get loose anyway.... if you get some players that aren't spraying the ball everywhere, it's someone working on their drop shot slice ball that just comes over the net, or someone working on their 90 mph forehand drive from the baseline... total sh*tshow... total. You might get one or two decent warmup groundstrokes on a given day - and if it's a cold day - fugeddaboudit!
Then it's on to the volley practice, more than half the women just skip this. Half the groundstrokers are skying balls over the volleyer or hitting the ball into the net or wildly across the court, and half the time the volleyers themselves are putting away angled volleys or slamming overheads and bouncing them out of the court, if they get a good volley at all. More running for balls over and over... switch volleyers and ground strokers, repeat... more running for balls over and over...
Then it's on to serve practice and sure, the first couple balls might go into the net (remember, it's doubles so we have two servers and we're only using oen can of balls at the moment), and then it seems that the guy is blasting balls 10 feet long and if he doesn't, the male returner is trying to rip a winner that he might hit the OTHER server with if they aren't paying attention... during this warmup, I try to hit very deliberate, very easy "second serves" for the first 2 or 3 shots, then warm up to a "real" second serve and hit about 5 or 6 of them, then the last 2 or 3 will be 85% speed first serves. Then servers switch courts and repeat the process... men tee off on women's patty cake serves, men try to hit aces on their serve warmups to the women... and then the other side serves... total sh*tshow...
I think at below ALTA B-5 they should just start everyone off cold and play "first serve in" for each server for the first points in each court haha! It would be less embarrassing.
