When Michele Madansky, our VP of corporate and sales research, approached me in the halls to play in the "1st annual" Google Yahoo! tennis tournament (cleverly called “The Battle Over the Net”), my initial response was, "No way!" I haven’t played tennis since my kids were born. And surely, if we were going to enter into any sort of competition with Google, we should recruit our Division I Harvard MBA over-achieving ringers to represent us (aren't there a few of these somewhere at Yahoo!?). When she informed me that they had 40 people and we only had 11, my fear of semi-public humiliation lost to my fear of our not showing up to a competition with Google. So I agreed.

I arrived to the Stanford Tennis Stadium in Palo Alto, California, early Sunday morning (at least there was no traffic on typically log-jammed Highway 101). I passed by the requisite tub of water, Gatorade, and beer (true); walked past the stack of PowerBars, fresh fruit, and large sheet cake with Yahoo! and Google logos on the icing (also true); and checked in and got my T-shirt (Unwritten law: When more than 50 people gather, there is always a T-shirt).

The rules of play were simple — 5-minute warm-up, eight games played, no-add scoring. A very casual process of assigning two teams to a court, and I was off to my first of three matches. During each match, we exchanged the friendly banter of "What group are you in?" and "How long have you been at the company?" All agreed this was purely for fun and a good cause. (All of the proceeds went to help the East Palo Alto Tennis and Tutoring program).

Throughout the morning, I couldn't help but notice that the average age of the Yahoos was at least 5 years over that of the Googlers. (Maybe our wisdom and experience would be an advantage over these youngsters — both on and off the court?) Google even had a real ringer with a home-court advantage — a woman who played on the Stanford tennis team and graduated in 2004 (making those of us who have already had our 20-year college reunions feel a bit, well... "experienced").

But in the end, Yahoo! won — 163 games to 157 games. A narrow margin, but less than one percent so at least I can sleep soundly knowing there will be no drawn-out recount. But more than the win, I actually had fun. Sure, there was healthy competition. But there was no antagonism, no resentment, no "attitude" from either team. We laughed and joked and enjoyed good tennis (here's the Flickr photoset as proof). The Net-net (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) — a fun time was had by all.

OK, now back to the trenches in the real battle over the Net...

Kate Gerwe
Senior Director, Marketing
Yahoo! Connected Life