Monday 16th January 2012
It was a much lighter day today as not only were we restricted by how much time we could spend on court but, after training / competing for the last 7 days, Mia needed a bit of time to recover before consolation tomorrow.
It was a very early start this morning; the centre didn’t open until 7am and I thought it was a bit too cold to do our warm up outside when the temperatures have been -1°C so we actually warmed up in a very warm conference room at the hotel at 6.20am. We then left the hotel at 6.45am, drove to centre and were straight on court after the doors opened just before 7am.
To her credit Mia worked very hard this morning after a very exhausting day yesterday and she wasn’t alone as just after 7am Mark Taylor and Marcus Walters turned up to have an early morning session too. We worked tactically on Mia’s game within the first 3 shots of the rally and then opened it out to full court points including specifics on her return of serve. After training for an hour Mark asked if Mia wanted to play some points with Marcus so they first set up points cross court on both sides and then finished off the session with a match tie-break which Mia just happened to win!!
By this time it was just after 8.30am and time for us to go back to the hotel for some well deserved breakfast. I then got stuck into some work finalising details for the upcoming trip to Kenya for three U18 ITFs while Mia caught up on some sleep she missed out on last night!
Just before midday we headed back to the tennis centre to watch and analyse some of the main draw matches. It’s great opportunity this week to watch some of the American and Canadian players and see how they compare to the Europeans especially when the likes of Nicole Frenkel and Ali Black are regarded as some of the best 1998 players in the world.
We spent most of the day at the tennis centre and then had an early dinner to prepare for Mia’s consolation match(es) tomorrow. If she can keep up the level that she played her main draw match at on Sunday and the level she trained at today then we’ll both be very happy no matter the result.
Schedule for tomorrow:
Mia Smith (GBR) (251) vs Mirjam Bjorklund (SWE) (95) – 1st match at 10am
