Sri Lanka U18 ITF Grade 5 (week 2), Day 3

Sunday 12^th October 2014

It was a good day of training today ahead of finding out if the boys have got into the doubles draw tomorrow.

We were up and at breakfast this morning at 8am as the plan for the day was to do two good sessions on court and a gym session too. However, when we arrived at the club at 9.15am we were surprised to see that there had been a huge downpour of rain directly over the club but there was no sign of it on the way to the club which is less than 1.5km! The referee told us that the courts would be out for the next 2-3 hours so we got straight back into a Tuk Tuk and went back to the hotel.

When we got back we hit the gym for a good hour and a half session where Toby went through a strength session followed by some intervals while Nils did some core work and finished with some intervals of his own.

We then had some lunch in the room and went over the details from the matches yesterday to prepare the boys for their on-court session in the afternoon.

Luckily for us the sun had been out since the big downpour this morning and when we arrived back at the club at 1.30pm the courts had dried out completely. The boys went through their physical warm-up on court and then hit for around 20 minutes before going straight into playing two sets.

Nils played very well in the opening set, it was probably the best I had seen him play on the whole trip and the issues that he had been having with his consistency were non-existent! Nils took a lead early on in the set and then maintained his focus until 4-0 when he threw in a random game of four unforced errors. He did well to get back on track in the next two games and won both of them to take the set 6-1. Toby’s level during the set had been a little erratic but the result of the set was mainly down to the level that Nils was playing at rather than mistakes that Toby was making.

At the end of the set I brought both boys together to go through some of the notes and stats that I had taken and then we re-set some goals before the boys went into their second set.

Toby found a much better level at the start of the second set and was able to dictate more of the points which resulted in him taking a 2-0 lead. Nils responded well and raised his level to break Toby and then hold himself to level the set at 2-2 but Toby fought back to hold serve in the next game which kept the set on serve. Despite some tight service games (especially Toby’s service game at 4-4 which lasted 10 points) the rest of the set went with serve until 5-4 when Toby managed to tough out another long game and take the set 6-4. By this stage the boys had been playing for over 2 hours and were both quite exhausted but they managed to sum up enough energy to finish the session with a match tie-break which Nils eventually won 10-8.

It was a good session where both boys worked hard on developing their games and also dealing with some difficult situations during the sets. Once we were finished we played a few games of ‘bounce’ as a cool down and then the boys consulted the referee about the possibilities of getting into the doubles tomorrow before we headed back to the hotel.

Nils joined his family for dinner this evening while Toby and I decided to have a change of scenery and go to the tennis club to eat at the Italian restaurant. We didn’t realise that it was movie night there though and they had a big screen set up right outside the restaurant:

After dinner we headed back to the hotel to relax and ended up watching the end of Die Hard 3 followed by almost the whole of Die Hard 4!!