Botswana U18 ITF Grade 5, Day 1

Thursday 23^rd April 2015

With the sun now shining in England (well … at least some of the time!) we can officially say summer is on its way and that leads us into one of my best periods of the year – the transition between indoor and outdoor tennis. It’s great for the players to be finally training outdoors after such a long period indoors and this is the time when some really good game development can occur. Gone are the training sessions or matches where points are won or lost after 2 or 3 shots and now we move into having to work harder, fight harder and be more disciplined to win points, games, sets and matches.

Having returned from Barbados a few weeks ago, Toby Huffer and I have been to LTA tournaments in Nottingham, Cambridge and North London and after training at the start of this week we are now in Botswana for the Grade 5 U18 ITF.

We travelled across London together (during rush hour but that was mainly because Toby missed a train!) yesterday afternoon and arrived at Heathrow Terminal 2 at about 5.30pm. We then checked-in, got some dinner and relaxed before our 10 hour 45 minute flight to Johannesburg. After doing some detective work before we boarded I managed to find the only 2 rows on the plane that had 4 empty seats so Toby and I positioned ourselves there and both had a solid 9 hours sleep!

Once we arrived in Johannesburg we had a short stopover of just over 2 hours before our next flight to Gaborone in Botswana. We were only on a very small plane and often the plane was bouncing around a bit in the turbulence but I don’t remember any of it as I was asleep again!

After clearing immigration and collecting our bags we were met by our driver for the week called Benny. Originally we were supposed to be staying at the Athletes Village but a few days ago the tournament director called me to say they’ve moved us to a guesthouse and given us a personal driver for the week – couldn’t really argue with that could we?!

Benny drove us to the guesthouse which is about 15-20 minutes from the club but he told us the driving time does depend on how many goats there are on the road – any we thought he was joking!!

After some lunch at the local Mall we headed to the club where it was great to see all of the courts packed with young junior players training / competing together. I’m not sure what format they were following but they were all getting very pumped up during the points and, by the looks of things, having a great time too!

Toby and I warmed up from 4.30-5pm then had a good first practice from 5-6pm where we were joined by UK based but Canadian national, Lee Sadler. We met Lee in Barbados when he was there with Dukes Meadows coach Harry Skinner and even though he’s not on the entry list for this week he’s decided to come out anyway and sign in.

Once we were done on court we showered and changed before Benny took us back to the Mall where we had dinner in Rodizio – a Brazilian restaurant famous in Gaborone for its meat platters but we had two very good pasta dishes instead.

From there it was back to ‘Mamas Guesthouse’ to unpack and get ready for training and signing in for Qualifying tomorrow.