Last night was the Boston Lobster's first home match of the 2008 WTT Tennis season. Having lost the night before away in Albany, they were looking for a win. Since this isn't a sports blog, you can read about the game here. I was responsible for the IT infrastructure, the most important piece during a match is the scoring system. Typically, the hardest part is trying to provide a wired network jack court side. Not to many tennis facilities built their courts thinking people would need to be plugging in routers, switches, access points, and computers on their tennis court. Anyway, last Thursday I worked with a networking consultant to figure out a solution that involved a wireless bridge back to the pool house 150' away. Everything worked smoothly during our testing Thursday night, allowing me to enjoy the holiday weekend stress free. I made up for that last night. Starting the setup at 4PM, we soon discovered that the wireless bridge that worked perfectly on Thursday was suddenly 50ft beyond the edge of it's range. We spent 45 minutes testing different locations and needed to relocate the entire scoring table from court side to near the facility entrance at the last minute. We were using two brand new network cables that came with some of the equipment, but one of them seemed to have a bad connection and worked intermittently. I brought a spare, but on setup we realized we were short a cable and our spare was needed elsewhere. Throughout the evening the equipment in the pool house would get jostled and I would need to go re-adjust the cable to fix our connection. It was so hot and humid that my Dell laptop overheated disabling the touch pad and half the keyboard. This made troubleshooting our setup more difficult. Finally we got things connected and running and all looked good. Jill (a volunteer helping out) commented that we were finally set. That's when I realized we should verify with the scoring company to make sure there weren't any unseen problems lurking for game time. Sure enough, while things looked good on our end, the remote side of the system could not see us. Another 30 minutes of troubleshooting. It turns out we had obsolete scoring software on the machines sent from the league that needed to be updated 30 min before match was to start. At 6:45, we finally felt ready for the 7:00 match. Five minutes later they tried to turn on the court lights and we lost all power at the facility. Electricians were called, but Jill had to manually keep track of everything until power could be restored into the second round. We were able to get the data entered into the system and the umpire up and running on the hand held by half time. Things started to look up, but then you had to look out for the dead bugs if you did. We had moved the table directly underneath one of the high intensity court lights. Within a half hour of restoring power a rain of dead bugs began falling from the sky, jamming up the keys on the laptop (not to mention getting into our hair and clothing).
Things finally settled down around 9PM as we seemed to hit our stride. The rest of the night went smoothly - until the very end. After the umpire verified the electronic scoring for the match, the final verification submission never registered with the main office. By the time I got called, the network had been dismantled and the computers had been shut down. Venus Williams will be playing at the next match, so the crowds will be bigger, more press will be looking for internet access, and the pressure will be more intense. Should be fun!
