Podgorica U18 ITF Grade 5, Day 5

Friday 31^st May 2013

It was another very successful day today as Georgie advanced to the singles semi-final while Holly and Georgie teamed up to destroy the 2^nd seeds in the doubles semi-final.

It was another early start for the team this morning but after telling the players they could be at breakfast between 6.45-7am I was very surprised when I arrived at 6.45am to find them all there!

We got a taxi over to the club at 7.45am but when we arrived all of the courts were out of action due to a storm last night. At around 8.15am the referee said that 2 courts were fit for practice so there would be space for the 16 main draw players to hit in 2 sessions of 20 minutes at 8.20am. That was perfect for us and Georgie and Holly spent 20 minutes warming up before hitting from 8.40am until the matches started at 9am.

During the next 2 hours I met with both Georgie and Holly to review their matches from yesterday and then get them prepared for today. Georgie’s game plan was a little different today; she’d been working throughout the trip on being aggressive from the back of the court and taking more balls on but against the big hitting Romanian those tactics would have played right into her opponents hands. Instead today was about playing smart, taking some pace off and finding more angles to make her opponent cover more ground.

Georgie went on at 10.45am to play Christiana Tudor and was fully prepared to deal with the Romanian’s antics and arguments with her mother! Georgie broke 3 times in the first 6 games but was broken back straight away each time. She finally held to level the set at 4-4* and by this stage she was starting to find the middle ground between being too passive and too aggressive. Georgie went on to break again and then held her serve well to take the opening set.

I was hoping for the second set to be more one sided after Georgie broke in the opening game but she really struggled to hurt Christiana from the end of the court where the wind was blowing in her face. In fact, up until 3-3 every game that was played into the wind was lost until Christiana held serve to lead 4-3. At this stage Georgie changed ends to have the wind behind her and held serve comfortably. The next game was very long but Georgie finally came out on top and would serve for the match facing the wind. When she came down my end I encouraged her to play more like she was on a hard court to get a better depth and penetrate more which she did immediately. That led to her holding serve for the first time from that end and taking the match 6-4, 6-4. It wasn’t a great performance from Georgie today but the conditions were tough and her opponent was difficult to deal with throughout.

Georgie only had just over an hour break between matches and most of it was spent talking about the singles match and getting some lunch. Her and Holly then went on court at 2pm to face 2^nd seeds Milica Novakovic & Ege Tomey.

I’ve always been a firm believer that doubles, and especially girls / women’s doubles, can be quite simple if you have a pair on court who know what they are doing and are willing take risks at the net. I’ve worked with players who have played doubles from U14 European level to winning $100k challenger events and all the way up to Grand Slam level and it’s the ones that do the basics well that are always the most successful.

Today’s doubles semi-final was up there with one of the most satisfying doubles wins I’ve ever had players involved in. Both players played extremely well and Holly in particular played outstanding both from the back of the court and at the net. Georgie and Holly completely took their opponents apart and even a couple of breaks of serve against them in the second set couldn’t distract them as they stormed through 6-0, 6-2.

It was great to see Holly with a big smile on her face at the end of the match after her difficult singles match yesterday but Georgie still thought that she should have played better!! We all stayed on the court straight after the doubles to do some specific work with Georgie following her singles match and when Georgie was happy with her level we called it a day.

While Georgie and Holly had been on court, Katty and Alex were having a good training session themselves and finished off with a couple of good practice sets. Once they were done the whole team had a thorough stretch out and we managed to get away from the club early today at 4.30pm.

As Katty is flying home tomorrow the dinner this evening included the trip quiz but I was totally shocked by how little the players know about the basics in tennis e.g. height of the net, length of the court etc. Georgie eventually came out on top with a score of 17 out of 60 so her dinner and dessert was paid for by me while Holly Horsfall had the closest guess of how many games in total everyone had played this week – she guessed 393 and the total was 397!

Her prize for the bonus question was a bar of chocolate which made the rest of the team very jealous!!

Schedule for tomorrow:

(1) Tereza Mihalikova (SVK) (263) vs (4) Georgie Axon (GBR) (379) – 1^st match at 10am

Girl’s Doubles Final:

(1) Kseniia Bekker (RUS) & Tereza Mihalikova (SVK) vs (3) Georgie Axon (GBR) & Holly Hutchinson (GBR) – after rest