Barbados U18 ITF Grade 4, Day 11

Sunday 7^th April 2013

We had another good practice day today before we left Barbados to head to Guadeloupe for our final event of the trip.

The morning followed the same timetable as yesterday; we had an early breakfast and then got the bus to the Hilton hotel to train on their hard courts. It was quite a hot and humid morning but the players worked very hard both in the drilling for the first hour and then in the point play after. Usually I’d prefer to get to the next event as early as possible to train on their courts and get used to the new environment but due to flights only leaving Barbados on Thursdays and Sundays we decided to stay.

At around 10.30am we decided to finish the session with some match tie-breaks. The first one was just a warm up and I beat Alex while Georgie beat Mia but the second one was the big one as we played for bus fares back to the hotel! The winners then played each other and unfortunately the boys took a beating – Georgie took me down 10-5 which some outrageous tennis (!) while single-handed Mia beat Alex 10-5. We then cooled down and changed before heading back on the bus to Café Sol for a Mexican lunch.

We got back to the hotel at 1pm and were told that we could stay in our rooms until we needed to leave for the airport which meant we could relax and take our time packing up. At 3pm we got a taxi to the airport and luckily I managed to sweet talk the check-in staff again to allow us to take our tennis bags to the plane. Unfortunately I forgot that I left my Swiss Army knife in my tennis bag and the security staff were not too pleased about it!! Luckily I managed to get it back before we boarded our 1^st flight to Dominica.

After a brief turnaround in Dominica we were told that the next flight to Guadeloupe was 16 minutes long – it was in fact 25 minutes long but still one of the shortest I’ve been on.

We arrived in Guadeloupe at just after 7.30pm and were picked up by the tournament transport who took us straight to the tournament site so that we could sign in. We then went straight to the hotel, checked in and had a quick dinner at a local restaurant before heading off to bed.

None of the players are scheduled for singles tomorrow but Alex will definitely have doubles which will be after 3.30pm.