Scott Gerber photographed the action photos and most, but not all, of the state qualifier group photos.

OhioTennisZone.com Interview

FRIDAY, APRIL 1,

Behind the Scenes at OhioTennisZone.com

A constant question encountered by OhioTennisZone is "What does it take to create the tennis web site sensation of OhioTennisZone.com?" Now all OTZ fans will know. [Editor's note: Today's special feature was created by the OTZ data center team. While this team may lack social skills, they are Excel savants and they have proved to be the most reliable of OTZ's employees.]

Data Center
Data Center @ 4:23am - Click to enlarge

The data center is fully staffed by 5:00am each morning as tennis data is gathered, filtered, arranged, and rearranged from the previous day's matches from throughout Ohio. Barring unforeseen issues, the data updates are completed by 8:00ET each morning. This group continues to work until 2pm and then they return again in the evening to start processing scores from coaches. Did you know that OTZ provides 40-50% of central Ohio's high school tennis scores to the Columbus Dispatch?

The writers start looking over the data technicians' shoulders about a half hour before they finish their work so they can get a quick start on how to insightfully shape the previous day's results. This irritates the data team. Some of the writers spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with humorous comments which are then removed by the Grammar Police / Militia. The "written" portion of each day's update is typically finished by 9am. Alert OTZ readers know that more twisted humor is included on the web site first thing in the morning before the grown-ups and Grammar Police arrive.

OTZ Grammar Police
OTZ Grammar Police - Click to enlarge
The Grammar Police / Militia arrives at niner point zeero minutes after the data team completes their work to begin reviewing the efforts of the writers. This group is fully militarized and they occasionally show up early to taser the data workers to keep them alert. They look, for the proper use, of commas. They hate semi-colons; and exclamation marks!! They also clean-up any humor attempts by the writers. They are disliked more than they are feared.

Because they reportedly stay late into the evening, the graphics department shows up at 11:45am and they break for lunch at noon. In addition to insuring that OTZ is one of the most stylish, hip, and mobile-friendly sites on the Internet, they are charged with font experimentation and readibility. They went on-strike a few years ago to protest the use of numbers on the web site - declaring that happy faces be used to depict losses and happier faces be used for wins. They reluctantly returned to work after they realized that OTZ's high bandwidth connectivity offered far superior viewing for cat videos in comparison to the bandwidth in their trendy, Short North apartments. The Grammar Police has reported that they leave work a few seconds after the data department leaves at 2pm. They will be the last ones to use the zip-line.

OhioTennisZone.com
OTZ Headquarters - Click to enlarge
The photographers are dispatched in the afternoon to capture exciting action photos (which are largely free of any humorous facial contortions) . The photographers want new, expensive gear each year despite not selling many photos. They know they will eventually be replaced with smart-phone wielding mothers when (or if) these mothers figure out how to take their smart-phone cameras out of "selfie" mode. Until then, there will be an oversupply of photos shared on Facebook of mothers looking into cameras at high school tennis matches.

Nuclear armageddon? No problem. Direct asteroid hit? No sweat. The OTZ staff will zoom off using a five minute zip-line escape to a secure, off-site location that is backed up by twin, plutonium-powered CAT Series NextGEN generators. These daisy-chained beasts produce 1.21 gigawatts of power that will be utilized to short-wave-wi-fi the results to eager Ohio high school tennis fans. To evenly distribute the load on the zip line, the data center team gets first dibs, followed by the writers, photographers, Grammar Police, and then precisely two minutes later, the graphics department. The Grammar Police have been ordered to immediately sever the zip-line after they arrive at the location.

Happy holiday.