Tennis identity and crew roles: B-singles / A-doubles, Head Master sticks, the bench-press, designated driver

texture · STANDING

• When: STANDING — recurring roles across YDAU
• What: Schacht plays #3 singles on the 18's B team but #2 doubles on the A team with Troeltsch (event 1), and rooms with Pemulis and Troeltsch in the triple. In the rankings he is now "barely hanging on" — over only Pemulis among the top-table crowd — "and is showing incredible balls just hanging on." He swings discontinued aluminum Head Master sticks with orange Gamma-9 strings, carries only three, coverless, and takes endless flea-market kibitzing for it with a smile: no way would he let an academy dictate his brand. He is enormously strong — in Pemulis's fiercely-wagered-on bench-press challenge last spring he was the one who finally out-lifted the U.S.S. Millicent Kent ("two hundred kilos if she was a kilo"; Kahn lost, Freer refused to show), then doffed his cap to her. And he is the crew's dependable designated driver: he "cheerfully wordlessly drives the tow truck on occasions when the rest of the crew are so incapacitated they'd have to hold one eye closed even to see an undoubled road," sits inside the truck — "and sometimes Ortho Stice" with him — on nights like I-Day Eve, "faces green in the green glow of the truck's instruments, warming it up," while the others smoke, and "consents w/o protest to pay retail for clean quarterly urine" he barely needs.