Namibia U18 ITF Grade 5, Day 3

Saturday 10^th May 2014

It was another good day of training today as we close in on the Main Draw which starts on Monday.

Last night I asked Toby to plan the next two days of training both on and off the court so that he was in control of what and how much he did on both days. He decided that we’d have an early start this morning to have a full training day and then reduce everything tomorrow so that he is fresh for his first match on Monday. We were therefore up and at breakfast by 6.20am this morning before getting the first bus to the club at 7am.

Toby and I then warmed up and had a good session on the match courts from 7.30 – 8.30am before the qualifying matches started. Toby hit well throughout the hour and it is obvious that the amount of training he has done in the last week has really helped him to increase the confidence in his game. He is looking strong from the back of the court and his volleys are improving each day – if he can keep trusting his game on the match court then I think he can do really well this week.

Even though we lost the court at 8.30am, we went straight down onto centre court to work on serve and return for another half an hour before heading into the clubhouse to go through a strength and conditioning session. Toby followed his own S&C programme while I went through my own and I think both of us managed to keep each other motivated without saying a word!

After stretching out, we got a lift back to the hotel with one of the tennis coaches and then spent an hour relaxing before it was time for lunch. Toby then got stuck into some school work for a couple of hours until 3pm when it was time to go back over to the club for our second session of the day.

As this morning was spent working on specific areas of Toby’s game we decided that the afternoon session would be mainly point based. Like yesterday afternoon, Brandon joined us and both boys competed hard for almost an hour and a half. Even though we played a lot of points during the session we set them up based around finding a good aggressive balance to ensure the level of both players remained high.

At 5pm we got the shuttle bus back to the hotel where Toby and I debriefed today’s on and off court sessions and then came up with a good plan for our final training day tomorrow.

Earlier today we did discuss having a change of plan for dinner and going somewhere different but in the end Toby decided to have it at the hotel restaurant. He decided to go for the chicken curry again which last week proved to be a little difficult to get out of the red hot cauldron that it came in. Tonight however he was ready for his ‘Bush Tucker Trial’ as he called it: