Bermuda U18 ITF Grade 5, Day 1

Saturday 22^nd June 2013

After a long day of travel yesterday, Alex had his first day of preparation today before main draw starts on Monday.

I met Alex Hagon at London Bridge train station yesterday before we started our journey to Gatwick for our 3pm flight to Bermuda. The flight was quite smooth, the movies were quite average but I did enjoy a couple of hours of sleep! We landed in Bermuda just after 6.30pm and once we cleared customs we were met by the tournament transport who drove us straight to Warwick Camp barracks which will be our home for this tournament.

The barracks are still in use by the military in Bermuda but for this week the players and coaches will be taking it over as part of the full hospitality offered by the tournament. When we were choosing which event to do this week we had two options; either the Grade 4 ITF in Tunisia or this one in Bermuda and because of the full hospitality offered here it actually worked out the much cheaper option.

This morning we were both up early due to the jet lag and met for breakfast around 7.30am. Alex had struggled to get a lot of sleep in the 30 bed boy’s dorm but I slept like a baby in the coach’s dorm which only had two of us in it last night!

We headed to the courts at 9am and, after a long physical warm up to loosen up after the long flight yesterday, we got on court to train from 10-11.15am. The courts at the club are excellent and we had a good session which focussed mainly on consistency from the back of the court while trying to acclimatise to the heat. We were both still a little tired but we knew we would be and that’s why we decided to come out a couple of days early.

After the session we walked into Hamilton to go to the supermarket and stock up on water and food. When we returned to the club the first round of the boy’s qualifying was still going on so we got some lunch and watched some of the matches.

Then at 2.15pm it was time for our second session of the day so we warmed up and then managed to get on one of the match courts as the qualifying only needed 2 courts.

Our second session was very good and Alex looked a lot more comfortable in the conditions. The match courts were quicker than the practice courts and more like the surface we’d been training on at home for this event. After warming up and going through some drills, Alex decided he wanted to play some points to finish the session but despite him leading 9-8 in the tie-break he just couldn’t finish me off before a big storm came over which ended our session!

We tried to shelter from the rain in the covered stands next to the courts but the storm was quite aggressive and the rain ended up coming in sideways!! We managed to find a room under the stands to stretch out and then at 4.30pm we got the shuttle back to the camp.

After a good dinner of sweet and sour chicken and rice in the ‘Corporal’s Mess’, we headed across the road from the barracks to check out the local beach and ended up coming across a beach party!

We’ve got one more day of preparation tomorrow which will hopefully involve two more on court sessions as well as the opening ceremony for the event.