Wednesday 4th April 2011
Superb day of training today as we had our last day in Daytona Beach and started the preparation for the next event.
It was strange to wake up this morning with it dark outside and even more strange when we had to wait for the restaurant to open for breakfast at 6.30am! We got to the club at 7.30am and didn’t struggle to find a practise court, we weren’t the first ones there though as a lot of the players competing this week are very professional and committed to becoming pro players. That obviously takes a lot of work and I can see that lots of the American juniors have got the attitude that you need to be good at a senior level as well as a junior level.
We started the session with an extended warm up which both of us found tough, I tried to make it look easy but I was feeling it too by the time we hit the first ball!! We then had the best two hours of training that we’d had since we arrived, Devan really put the work in mentally and it really showed as her level increased throughout the session. We spent a lot of time drilling from the back focusing on the effect each of her shots was having on me and exploring the difference between committing & being aggressive and committing & hitting hard. As we went into a lot of point play the focus turned to how many unforced errors were hit compared to winners and out of the unforced errors how many did Devan improve her game on. Missing is acceptable if you develop your game from it, if you miss and don’t improve it’s a waste of time and effort.
After working out for 2 and a half hours we went straight up onto the balcony and went through our pre-hab / injury prevention band exercises for the next 20 mins before showering and changing and leaving site for lunch.
The tennis centre is located directly opposite the Daytona Beach LPGA golf course and we had been recommended going to the golf club for some lunch. It didn’t disappoint; the food was great, as was the view but the best part was definitely the water!
View from the balcony of the restaurant
One of the hardest things to balance when on the road is finding time to complete school work. Devan has been really good this week; she has set aside time more or less each day for work and as we started early today it gave her a few hours in the middle of the day to again get stuck into work before we headed out to the beach for some fitness training.
We got to the beach at 4pm and started with a 30 minute run up the beach followed by a series of sprints in the deep sand, some specific medicine ball work, some core exercises and we finished the training with some tough work with the bungee cord. After the training we cooled down by throwing my Aerobie frisbee around – Devan almost took out some pedestrians on the promenade but it was all good!!
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By this time is was just past 6pm, we knew we’d finish quite late so we brought clothes to change into for the evening and managed to find somewhere to shower to try and clean all the sand off!! We had dinner in a really nice Italian restaurant called Rossellini’s and then had a walk along the promenade to end a fantastic days training.
Tomorrow we leave Daytona Beach to head down to Plantation but around half way down the coast there is a $50,000 women’s event on in Indian Harbour so I think we’ll stop there for lunch and check out how fellow Brits Laura Robson and Mel South are getting on.
