South Africa U18 ITF Grade 2 (week 2), Day 5

Wednesday 12^th March 2014

One win and one loss today saw the end of our tournament here in South Africa but there have been lots of learning points and Ben has developed well over the two weeks.

Under normal circumstances, as soon as one of the players has lost in the singles on one of my trips they treat the rest of the week as a training week alongside their doubles matches. That means that if they just had one doubles match in the day, they would train for at least an hour and a half on the court and also go through their normal strength and conditioning programme off the court. However, due to the injury that Ben has sustained to his arm it has not been possible for him to do a lot of training and it was important that he saved his arm for his doubles matches.

With that in mind Ben had a lie-in this morning while I got up early again to get another run completed at the gym. It was a hard one today; 15 miles on a running machine can never be classed as enjoyable but raising money to help very sick children helps to motivate me every day – please sponsor me – www.justgiving.com/robslondonmarathon2014.

I met Ben at 10.30am at the club and, as he had missed breakfast at the hotel, he wanted to have an early lunch to make up for it. We therefore headed over to Beef Boys Grill at 11.30am and had a good lunch of chicken breasts and baked potato before walking back to the club. We then warmed up at 1pm and went through some movement and speed work before we started hitting.

We then hit for around 25 minutes but due to the tightness and pain in Ben’s right forearm we had to make sure that the session remained light. When we were done Ben released the muscles in his forearm again and then iced it to try and reduce the inflammation. Up until that time in the day the weather had been really nice . . . but then the rain came down for the next 45 minutes!

Luckily there was quite a bit of wind today and the sun came out immediately after it stopped raining so by 4.30pm the courts were completely dry.

After warming up, Ben and David went on court at 4.45pm to conclude the match that they started on Monday and they didn’t waste any time in finishing the match off! They broke Michael straight away and then David held serve well to win the match 6-4, 6-1. Ben’s arm was a little sore on returning but fortunately he didn’t have to serve.

As Ben and David were already warm they decided to go straight into the next match which, like last week, had been changed to short sets up to 4 games due to the weather. This week in the ¼ finals they faced 3^rd seeds Lloyd Harris and Brandon Laubser from South Africa and before the match I was very confident that Ben and David would come through it with a win. However, from the opening game the South African’s played very well and Ben and David didn’t quite find the form they did last week. To all of our surprise in the second game of the match Brandon walked to the back of the court and then was violently sick all over the court! Due to the mess the boys had to change courts and when they restarted Ben and David broke back to level the set. Ben served in the next game and was also broken but Lloyd finally held serve first to give them a 3-1* lead. David then held serve after another close game and then Brandon, who had recovered extremely well from being sick, held to take the first set 4-2.

In the second set the South African’s continued to dominate and even though the first two games went against serve they went on to take the second set 4-1. Both Ben and David were very disappointed when they finished but Ben said that he was really struggling with his arm and that really affected his serve.

Once Ben had iced his arm, he cooled down and stretched out in the gym and then, as it was almost 7pm, we walked over to the restaurant for dinner.

After dinner we headed back to the hotel to change our flights and get ready to leave tomorrow.

It’s been a good two weeks of competing, learning, improving and dealing with difficult situations both in terms of the altitude / conditions and dealing with injuries. Overall Ben has worked hard and despite some difficult draws he has remained positive and got some good results in the doubles.

My next trip will be to the U18 ITF Grade 1 in Carson, USA at the end of March, so until then . . .