Nottingham U18 ITF Grade 4 (week 1), Day 1

Monday 11th April 2016

Following on from the U18 LTA Grade 2 event in Nottingham last week, Toby Huffer and I travelled back up yesterday to prepare for the first of two weeks of U18 ITFs at the Nottingham Tennis Centre.

We were up bright and early this morning at 5.30am and after a good breakfast we left the hotel at just after 7am. When we arrived at the tennis centre we were the first ones there so we had the pick of any of the 16 outdoor hard courts but, as matches were scheduled on 12 of the courts, we decided to stay out of the way and go on Stadium Court.

It was quite cold this morning so we warmed up for around 30 minutes before getting on the court to start our practice session at 8am. For the first hour of the session we had the whole court and continued to work on things that had been identified last week but at just before 9am some of the Scottish team, led by Toby Smith, joined us for the last half an hour. Even though we were restricted to half the court we were still able to work on what we needed to and after we hit some serves we finished with points for the last 15 minutes.

At 9.30am the Qualifying matches started so we watched some of those and then headed back to the hotel to get some food and relax.

We were back on-site at 1.45pm to warm up for our second session of the day and this time I stepped aside and let Ewen Lumsden battle with Toby for an hour and a half. The boys warmed up on one of the back courts and then moved across to court 9 to get a full court so they could play a practice set together. By this stage the wind had really picked up but despite that the boys played a good set which saw Toby take a 2-0 lead before Ewen fought back to take it 6-3.

Once they had finished the set there was still 15 minutes left before we lost the court so the boys decided to play another couple of service games each.

By this time it was gone 4pm and the sign-in had opened for the Main Draw. As always everyone wants to sign-in at the same time so the queue ended up going right out of the tournament office and across to the indoor courts!

After Toby had signed in we went back to the hotel to change and then headed out early to Zizzi to get some dinner. Last week we had talked about playing mini-golf almost every day but we didn’t have time to get around to playing so we decided yesterday that we’d do it this evening.

Well . . . over dinner Toby was telling me how much he was going to destroy me at mini-golf but after I selected the gold ball from the reception there was only ever going to be one winner! It was looking quite close to begin with but a 6 from Toby and a hole-in-one from me on the 12th hole put to rest any ideas that Toby had of beating me. I’ll save Toby’s pride by not telling you the score but put it this way . . . I could have shot 13 on the last hole and still won!

While we were playing the draw came out:

After the golf we headed back to the hotel to prepare for tomorrow and get a good night’s sleep.

Schedule for tomorrow:

(6) Ryan Nijboer (NED) (393) vs Toby Huffer (GBR) (1166) – 4th match after 9am (not before 1pm)