Match Day Attire

I was toying with a couple of ideas for today’s blog, not really feeling any of them, until I read Martha’s funny comment on yesterday’s post. If you didn’t see it, I posted a clip of the absurdly over-produced pre-match player introduction at the St. Petersburg Open, complete with gyrating girls and glow-in-the-dark racquets.

Martha suggested her team adopt the girls’ belly-baring attire as their team uniform for the upcoming season. And then it hit me–I should write about team uniforms!

In my fall league, probably less than half of the teams wear matching uniforms. My own team has always decided against it, although uniforms do offer a number of advantages:

• They make it easier to get dressed in the morning (just like with private school).
• They can help foster team spirit, which coach Erin Reeves says is key to a winning team.
• They project a professional, and possibly intimidating, image to the opposition. (Usually I’m less impressed with the uniforms than I am with the fact that their captain got ten or more women to agree on a tennis outfit. In fact, at one match a few years back, I distinctly remember wondering, How did she get all of them to wear that butt-ugly uniform?)

But I think there are cons to uniforms as well:

• Someone on the team will dislike the uniform. Even if you select a clothing line with different options for the top (such as a tank or a tee), the color will be the same. There’s simply no way to get everyone to like the same color. Someone’s going to be unhappy.
• Even if you think the uniform’s okay, you probably own another outfit that you actually love, one that makes you feel fierce and invincible. Shouldn’t you wear the outfit that puts you in the best frame of mind going into a match?
• If you show up in a team uniform and the opposition, in their mismatched clothes, kicks your butts, you look a little silly…like maybe you should have spent more money on lessons and less on your appearance.
• And what if you forget to do the laundry???

Although my team has considered team uniforms in the past, we could never get any consensus on the color. Sometimes our doubles partners try to coordinate among themselves. Other times, we just wear whatever we like…and whatever happens to be clean.

On the other hand, my team has been finishing the season in the middle of the pack for the last few years. Maybe it’s time to try a uniform.

So for this Friday’s Fashion Face-off, we’ll look at a few choices for uniforms. I’ll let you guys vote and then present the results to my team. With the right outfit, maybe we’ll end up at the top of the heap this year!

How do you feel about team uniforms? Do they help create team camaraderie? What if the uniform is orange and puke green–or Nishikori brown? Wouldn’t you end up hating the team that’s making you wear it?