The Fed Cup starts this weekend and it will be an exciting weekend of team tennis for the lades as the premier tournament for this type of competition begins. Ten tournaments make up the first weekend, USA and Russia being one of those, in the World Group playoffs. We'll get to that tournament in a moment, but we have also five others: Serbia and Slovakia, Belgium and Estonia, Italy and Czech Republic, Germany and France and Poland and Spain. You can watch the Fed Cup live by getting your membership at any of the links on this page where you can watch in high quality video.

So, USA and Russia enter the playoffs, having faced off seven times before with USA at a slight advantage holding the 4-3 record. However, Russia has the most recent wins, taking all three of the most recent of the seven times they have faced and all since 2005. So, we'll see if recent history repeats or if the USA can pull it off this year, as they have won the most titles of any other nation with a total or seventeen and the most recent in 2000. Here's who they have to do it with. Melanie Oudin, Bethanie Mattek-Sands, Liezel Huber and team captain Mary Joe Fernandez.

Russia however has won the Fed Cup title four different times since 2004 and have the most wins of any team in recent years. They got here with a first round against Belgrade, an effort requiring the efforts of two top teams member's beating Belgrade's top girls. The Russian team is Elena Dementieva, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, Ekaterina Makarova and Alla Kudryavtseva with Shamil Tarpischev captain the squad. You can watch Russia and the USA compete in this Fed Cup playoff by getting your membership at the links on this page to watch in streaming video live.