Namibia U18 ITF Grade 4, Day 1

Friday 1^st May 2015

After a long day of travelling from Botswana to Jo’burg and then on to Namibia yesterday, we had a good training day today to get ready for Qualifying which starts tomorrow.

As the altitude here in Windhoek is around 700 metres higher than in Botswana we decided to have two training sessions today; one to do a lot of drilling to get used to how the ball reacts and one to play a practice set to get fully prepared for Toby’s first Qualifying match.

In order to get both sessions in we had breakfast at 8am and then, after a quick stop at the supermarket to stock up on water, we got to the club at 9.30am. We then had a really good first training session which involved a lot of repetition drills, a lot of changing ends to get used to the wind and then finished with a lot of work on serve and return. We had planned on training for around an hour and 30 minutes but by the time we finished it ended up being almost two hours. While we were training fellow Brit Olivia Elliott and her coach David Felgate came on to the court next to us for their first training session since arriving yesterday. It was great to see someone as young as Olivia getting out there and competing in ITFs as soon as possible. I’m a big believer in players competing abroad as early as they can to gain valuable experience and also get used to playing in different environments so I really hope Olivia does well this week.

Once we had finished our session we walked up the road to get some lunch and then headed back to the club to relax . . . well . . . that was the plan but no sooner had I sat down than Toby had me up competing against him at table tennis – good job I beat him then!!

We went back on court at 2pm to warm up again for our second training session of the day but as we started we noticed a few very dark clouds drifting over from behind the club house. We managed to go through our whole physical warm up but while we started hitting it started to spit a little with rain. We came off court briefly but then the rain stopped so we went back on and managed to start a set. However, at 1-1 and with Toby serving at *15-40 it started to rain too hard to continue (I think the rain did Toby a favour to be honest as I was just about to break serve!!).

We waited until 4pm but the rain didn’t let up so Toby had a really good stretch out and then signed in for Qualifying. We then got picked up by our hotel driver at 4.30pm and headed back to our rooms to relax for an hour before dinner.

The food at the hotel is generally very good and I think there were only a couple of occasions last year when we actually ate away from the hotel. While we were at dinner the draw came out:

As Toby has a Bye he doesn’t play until Sunday so tomorrow will be another training day and maybe we might get a full set in!