Sri Lanka U18 ITF Grade 5 (week 2), Day 1

Friday 10^th October 2014

As week 2 starts here in Colombo it was another very wet day but we made the most of it and ended up getting in a good session on court this afternoon.

The plan for today was always to have a lighter morning and let the players have a lie-in as they’d been getting up between 6-7am for the last week, and then have a longer training session this afternoon. As the morning went on it seemed as though everything was going to plan; the boys didn’t set an alarm and just let themselves wake up naturally and then after breakfast they both got stuck into some school work.

We then all had lunch in the apartment at 12pm and had planned on going over to the club at 1pm but almost as soon as we finished eating a huge thunderstorm came over Colombo:

We knew the courts would be flooded so we decided to stay at the hotel for a while and eventually went over to the club at 3pm. Even at that time the match courts were still very wet so we went down to the bottom two hard courts and, while the boys went through their warm-up routines, I swept the puddles off the court!

Once we had completed some good sprints Toby and Nils began hitting and despite the court still being quite wet we had a good session for an hour and a half. We did a lot of work on depth and consistency of shots and then moved on to warming up their volleys before the boys decided to finish with some points.

By the end of the session both boys felt good and ready for their match tomorrow.

Once Toby and Nils had signed in we went back to the hotel to change and then headed out to dinner at the other Hilton again. During the meal the draw was posted and to our surprise there were only 15 players in Qualifying!

After dinner we headed back to the hotel and started watching the next DVD in the pile which was “A million ways to die in the West”. We’re currently about half way through and it’s actually not bad!

Schedule for tomorrow:

Nils Larsson Regnstrom (SWE) (UNR) vs Devanand Mohan (IND) (UNR) – 1^st match at 12.30pm

Rishi Reddy (IND) vs Toby Huffer (GBR) (UNR) – 2^nd match after 12pm