Bar U18 ITF Grade 4, Day 1

Sunday 19^th May 2013

After travelling from Kent yesterday morning with Alex Hagon, we met Holly Hutchinson, Holly Horsfall and Georgie Axon at Heathrow Terminal 4 before we started our long journey to Montenegro. It was great to be travelling again with all of the players as I’ve now seen them all compete and, through recent communication with their coaches, I’m familiar with what they’re going to be working on over these next two weeks.

After Holly Hutchinson’s regular bag search in security (Georgie actually got stopped this time too!) I was once again amazed by the things the players take on the plane – I think they had 7 bags of dried apricots / dried mango between them!!

After a short delay we left Heathrow and a few hours later, most of which I managed to sleep apart from a brief interruption due to pretty bad turbulence, we landed in Belgrade. We then had just over 3 hours to wait until our final flight to Podgorica in Montenegro.

By the time we got out of the airport it was around 11.30pm and thankfully our taxi driver was there waiting to take us the 45 minute journey to Bar. Once we arrived at the hotel we had a few problems with the rooms but managed to finally get checked in and into bed by around 12.45am.

The players and I had a lie in this morning which meant that we met for breakfast at 9am. We then visited the local supermarket to stock up on water and food before heading off to the club at 10.30am.

Our first impression of Bar was that it was a very picturesque place; we have to walk along the promenade past the marina to get to the tennis club and in the background behind the courts there is an amazing view of the mountains – Georgie was also very impressed by the courts being less than 50 metres from the beach!

There are only 4 match courts at the club which means that practice could be quite limited but there is also a hard court which can be used whenever we want to. As the practice courts were all booked up this morning we decided to warm up and go through a movement session for half an hour to get yesterday’s travel out of the player’s systems. All 4 players worked well and by the time we finished they were looking sharp and ready to get on the clay.

Once we’d finished the movement session it was around 12pm so we headed back to the hotel for lunch and then relaxed until around 2.15pm when we headed back to the courts for our afternoon practice. In the UK there isn’t much opportunity to practice on traditional European clay courts so for the first hour of the session we did a lot of specifics on height, shape and weight of shot to make sure they can make their opponents uncomfortable in the rallies. It didn’t take long before all 4 players got the hang of it and they all worked hard on their forwards and backwards movements to get into the right position to hit the ball as effectively as possible. We moved into points for the last 45 minutes of the session with the main focus being on Holly Horsfall and Alex who both play in qualifying tomorrow.

By 5pm all of the players were happy and Holly and Alex felt prepared for their matches tomorrow so we cooled down and stretched out to end the session. Holly and Alex then signed in before we made our way back to the hotel for dinner. On the way back I decided to try a short cut which was working out well until a pack of dogs decided they didn’t want us walking through their patch!!

After dinner at 7pm at the hotel we walked back to the club to check the order of play for tomorrow and book practice courts. There was then just enough time to have a nice stroll back past the marina to the hotel before we all decided to have an early night.

Schedule for tomorrow:

(WC) Srdjan Lazarevic (MNE) (UNR) vs Alex Hagon (GBR) (1676) – 2^nd match after 9am

Valeria Mishina (BLR) (2069) vs Holly Horsfall (GBR) (1908) – 3^rd match after 9am