Tri-Level Rehash

I went out to Kingwood on Saturday morning to check out some of the Tri-Level stuff. The quality of play was quite high this year. I've always said that tri-level is a great event and really wish there was more participation locally.

I really don't know more than what's been reported by the commenters. My understanding is that the Houston team went into the last match in a practically hopeless situation. Austin had won their first two matches and Fort Worth needed Houston to beat Austin in order to have any chance at advancing, and in fact pleaded with the Houston team to give their best effort, as it would be most fair for everyone.

While Fort Worth was worrying about Austin, they apparently didn't realize that by sweeping, Houston would put themselves in a position to win as well. After watching the Houston team in the morning match, this seemed EXTREMELY unlikely. I believe Tony Le was essentially captaining both the Fort Worth and Wild Dallas teams (could be wrong about this) and could have chosen to have his players retire in order to assure a 3-0 victory for Fort Worth, but instead allowed them to play it out. Well, witnesses reported that the line one match between Benjamin/Huynh and Luedtke/McClinton was won by Wild Dallas in the super tiebreaker. Apparently, when Le found out what happened in the Houston/Austin match, he realized his error and told his players to report the match as a 6-1, 6-1 win for Fort Worth.

It took them something like an hour to sort things out, and shamelessly no player who was on the court admitted the truth. Some Houston players witnessed the match but as biased observers their evidence was discounted.

It's hard to put a stop to someone captaining two teams...we've seen it locally quite a bit. Quite often, the person listed as the captain is just a figurehead for someone else controlling the team. I've probably been listed as captain myself a couple of times when I was doing very little actual captaining. There's a lot of shadiness in League Tennis, but the backroom dealing and/or match fixing is the worst of it. Not really sure how it can be prevented. I hear whispers every year about someone possibly laying down for someone else to allow their friends' teams to qualify for city playoffs. When there is so much smoke, there must be some fire behind those rumors.