Namibia U18 ITF Grade 5, Day 4

Sunday 11^th May 2014

It was a happy Mother’s Day today here in Namibia as we put the final touches to our preparation for week 2.

As I said yesterday, the schedule for today was much lighter than our other training days as it is very important that Toby is fresh and ready to go for his first round match tomorrow. With that in mind we had a lie-in and met for breakfast at 8am and then got the 9.30am bus to the club.

Once we arrived we warmed up straight away and then managed to get on court for an excellent 2 hour session from 10 – 12pm. The first hour was spent focussing on Toby’s groundstrokes and making sure that he had a really good feel for the ball from the back of the court. Then at 11am we managed to get a whole court to ourselves so we went straight into open points with the focus again being on finding a good aggressive balance. Even though we’ve been here well over a week, the altitude is still a little difficult to deal with and so we have to make sure that there is a complete commitment to every shot. It is fairly easy to be consistent in the rally but it is a lot more difficult to find a consistency with a high hitting level and that is what is required to compete with the best players in the tournament. After playing a few sets of conditioned points we finished the session with around 20 minutes of serving points and by the time we were finished Toby was feeling confident about his game. Just to finish off we decided to play a best of 3 set game of ‘Bounce’ and, as Toby was feeling very confident, he decided the loser would have the forfeit of jumping into the swimming pool at the hotel fully clothed! At 1 set all Toby thought he had a chance but I upped my game to take the deciding set 5-2!

The shuttle was waiting for us when we finished so we went straight back to the hotel where Toby went straight to the pool to do his forfeit. However, we didn’t realise that there would be loads of the tournament players around the pool to watch him do it!

After Toby’s ‘cooling off’ we stretched out and got a well-deserved shower before it was time for lunch. Last Sunday we had to have the buffet lunch at the hotel because there was nothing else available but it ended up being a lot more expensive than our normal pasta lunch. So today we headed to Nando’s to get some chicken and rice and when we arrived we saw that most of the other players had the same idea!

After lunch we headed back to the club as we were told by the tournament director that Toby still needed to sign in for Main Draw. Originally we were told that sign-in would open at 3pm but in the end it opened at 4pm and then the referee said we actually didn’t need to sign-in as Toby had officially been awarded a Wildcard! We weren’t too bothered about having to hang around until 4pm as it gave Toby a chance to get his own back on me with some of his own forfeits as he challenged me to Subway Surfers. I ended up doing some star-jumps on one of the stands by the side of the courts but Toby’s ones were much more special!

On our way to dinner in the evening Toby had to crawl into the restaurant and then ask the waiter his thoughts on a couple of meals while reading the menu upside down! Toby did both very well and just about managed to keep it together without bursting out laughing!

Over dinner the draw came out and here it is:

Schedule for tomorrow:

Pieter Theron (NAM) (UNR) vs (wc) Toby Huffer (GBR) (UNR) – 4^th match after 8.30am