South Africa U18 ITF Grade 2 (week 2), Day 1

Saturday 8^th March 2014

It was a very good day of preparation today as Ben continues to improve and work hard on and off the court.

Over the last few days we’ve been up early each morning so, with the main draw only 2 days away, it was very important that Ben feels fresh and is well rested before he plays on Monday. With that in mind we decided that Ben would have a lie-in and would meet me at the courts after breakfast while I got up early and got in a good run for 1 hour 10 minutes.

At 10.30am we headed over to the school courts as all of the courts at the club were being used for qualifying. Ben then went through his physical warm up and then at 11am he went on court with his doubles partner, David Volfson, for a very good training session. The boys warmed up and then drilled for the first 25 minutes before going into a practice set to work on their games while playing under a bit of pressure.

Ben’s serving was very impressive throughout the set this morning; his 1^st serve averaged 71% while the double faults that haunted him last week were reduced to just 1 in 5 service games. Ben was also much more aggressive from the back of the court and was only 1 winner short of our target of 10. After the set was finished David’s coach, Bruno, and I took on Ben and David in a match tie-break for the forfeit of ‘butts-up’. Bruno and I dominated the tie-break but somehow David and Ben managed to squeeze out an 11-9 victory – luckily their serves were off target on the ‘butts-up’!

Just as we were about to leave for lunch the French team decided to challenge us at some tennis football but it was anything but easy as the ball that Ben bought was more like a beach ball rather than a football!

While walking to the restaurant for lunch the Heavens opened and a huge thunderstorm came down but luckily by the time we had finished lunch and returned to the club the courts were almost dry.

At 3.30pm Ben warmed up again and then went on court with Jd Malan from South Africa for his second on court session of the day. The aim of the session was to again work on the quality of Ben’s groundstrokes as well as focus a lot on his return of serve and he did exactly that. The boys drilled for around 15 minutes before going into some points from the back of the court. They then warmed up some serves and finished the session with 2 service games each which again helped both of them to work on all of the areas of their games under a bit of pressure.

By 4.30pm we were finished so Ben went off to see the physio to loosen up his arm while I had a good stretch out on court. We then headed back to the hotel to shower and change before it was back to Beef Boy’s Grill for a good steak dinner!