Thursday 12th January 2012
Happy New Year everyone and welcome to the start of the second full year of International Travelling Coach. Last year I travelled to 25 International and domestic events and this year I have 33 planned including senior Men’s and Women’s events – it’s going to be busy so I hope you’re ready to keep up!
One year ago today I left Kent with Mia Smith and Milo Bargeron to go to my first ITC trip at Teen Tennis in Bolton and today it was exactly the same. I met Mia and Milo at the Bromley Tennis Centre at 7.45am this morning and we had a great training session until 10am when we got some lunch and then hit the road for the 250 mile journey to Bolton.
Within minutes of leaving the tennis centre Milo was fast asleep in the back of the car and Mia was wired into her laptop so I was left singing along to Capital Radio! The journey actually went quite quick despite taking four and a half hours; it must have been Mia’s amazing map reading skills (which almost took us to Liverpool!) or Milo’s film game where he kept naming films with a different letter than he was supposed to!!
We arrived at the tennis centre in Bolton just after 4pm and as we’d had previous experience of Teen Tennis we all knew that we weren’t going to be able to train on court today due to all the courts being booked out for coaching. We weren’t too disappointed by this as we’d already trained back in Kent and we knew what to expect so Mia and Milo took themselves through their full dynamic warm up to get the journey out of their system followed by some light band work. The players then signed in and we went back to the hotel to check in around 5pm.
By 6.15pm we were back at the tennis centre and had the draws in our hands. It was good to see that the boys draw was full and had a compete set of seeds – exactly how it should be for a Grade 1 Tennis Europe event, but the girls draw was again very disappointing. For those of you that followed my Blogs last year you’ll know that I was constantly going on about byes in the girls qualifying of the international events in Great Britain and today was once again very frustrating. It was exactly the same last year when there were again 3 byes but at least last year there were 13 seeded players – this year there are 3! Once again the centres that are funded to produce players for these kinds of events need to be made accountable.
Before the event we decided not to apply for a wildcard for Mia for the main draw as we want to get as many matches as possible under our belts before her ITF events in February but I am surprised by some of the main draw wildcards. In particular I’m surprised that Serena Nash has not had a wildcard as I think she’s been playing very well and has improved huge amounts in the last few months – it’ll be interesting to see how she gets on this week.
After we’d booked practise we headed over to ASK for dinner and then went straight back to the hotel for an early night.
Schedule for tomorrow:
Milo Bargeron (GBR) vs (2) Mathieu Rajaonah (FRA) – 4th match after 10am
(3) Mia Smith (GBR) vs Chelsea Samways (GBR) or Penny Roberts (GBR) – 5th match after 10am
