Earl Wilson/The New York Times Kathy Karadza was hard at work early this week at the United States Open tennis tournament in Queens.Kathy Karadza is under intense pressure during the early stages of the United States Open tennis tournament. She is in near-constant motion and the demand for perfection is often intense.
But Ms. Karadza is not a player, a coach or even a ball person. She is a highly trained seamstress, on site full time during the first nine days of the tournament, poised to make repairs and prevent any tennis outfit malfunctions. Forty alterations per day or more is routine.
“Once I walk in I don’t really stop,†Ms. Karadza said. “Hemming skirts, fixing stitching, putting bra pads in tanks. Someone tore her shorts. It was really hectic.â€
Clothing is chosen carefully to allow maximum performance, so having professional sewing help readily available is vital. “You want something that allows you to play without interference,†said Brian Baker, an American player who called upon Ms. Karadza to sew a patch bearing the name of a sponsor onto his clothing just before a singles match last Wednesday. “If the material is not the most comfortable, you’re not going to play your best and you’re going to think about it.†(Mr. Baker lost the match.)
Ms. Karadza, 37, who lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, has also employed her skills on the sets of soap operas, on fashion runways and behind the scenes of Broadway shows, like “The Lion King.’’ But last week, as the only official United States Open seamstress, she was stationed inside the women’s locker room at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, her sewing machine whirring almost constantly.
This is the first year Ms. Karadza has worked at the tournament, but the fourth year that the open has had an official seamstress. Before that, players were on their own, but officials decided that their sewing skills were lacking.
Male players often show up with multiple shirts that need a rip repaired or other alterations so that they will have plenty as mid-match replacements. “Someone needed seven,†Ms. Karadza said. “And he wanted them immediately. I got them done. People wait till the last minute. A lot of times it’s a half-hour before the match, I hand them the shirt.â€
Ms. Karadza’s most common task involves late requests to apply sponsors’ patches. These can be particularly tricky because size, color and placement restrictions are strictly delineated in several paragraphs of the official five-page tournament rule book on attire. Fines for faulty patch placement can cost players up to $20,000 per infraction.
In the early rounds, lower-ranked players who play on a court where the matches are televised can find themselves with new sponsors who want their names promoted. That was the case on Friday when Ms. Karadza was presented with an irregularly shaped VitaCoco patch to sew on Donald Young’s shirt hours before he lost a match played on the Grandstand court and broadcast on ESPN2.
To comply with the rules, Ms. Karadza lopped off the head of a palm tree and a cursive tag line, rendering the coconut water brand’s normally festive logo a more mundane, rectangular shape.
Another player, Camila Giorgi from Italy, needed Ms. Karadza’s help affixing a patch from an 11th-hour sponsor, SuperTennis, an Italian tennis channel, to the front of a pale blue dress designed my Ms. Giorgi’s mother. Ms. Giorgi wasn’t sure what she would have done had Ms. Karadza not been available. “I don’t sew â€" I will put it in a different way, maybe with an adhesive,†she said. (Ms. Giorgi wound up beating a higher-ranked player.)
As the tournament reaches the final rounds and the courts are taken over by top players, Ms. Karadza’s sewing hands are usually no longer much needed. Players tend to have longstanding sponsorships and plenty of camera-ready outfits. But should a new patch need to be applied after Ms. Karadza vacates her post, she says, some players have been known to resort to a common office device â€" a stapler.
