Sri Lanka U18 ITF Grade 5 (week 2), Day 4

Wednesday 14th October 2015

It was almost Déjà vu today but this time it wasn’t the rain that prevented Toby’s doubles match from going on, it was all the other matches going on too long!

Our day basically followed the same timetable as yesterday; an early morning gym session followed by breakfast and then we headed to SLTA at 11.15am to train on the hard courts.

We starting warming up on court as soon as we arrived as we were told that there wasn’t actually a practice schedule, all you could do was jump on a court when it was free! As we were warming up Ondrej arrived to prepare for his singles match and asked if Toby could warm him up so they trained together for around 25 minutes. I then took over from Ondrej and trained with Toby for the next hour with our focus again being on doubles tactics and specific volley work. As we were sharing the court we were often restricted to doing drills in the half court but that wasn’t a problem and actually made it more specific to doubles.

By 1.45pm we had gone through everything that we both wanted to work on so we finished the session with some points and then headed to the restaurant for lunch.

Over lunch we managed to get Muffi to give us a ‘not before’ time of 5pm which gave us enough time to head back to the hotel for a couple of hours rather than get tired hanging around at the club.

At 4.30pm we called Muffi to get an update on how things were going and he said that as Ondrej was still on court playing his singles match (which started at 2pm!) the doubles would be cancelled for the day.

As frustrated as we were that it was cancelled yet again we decided to go over to the club to give Ondrej some support in his match and then watch some of the other matches before it got dark. We then stayed on site and had dinner at Santoré before heading back to the hotel to relax for the evening.

Whilst we were watching the matches today I realised that I hadn’t taken any pictures and then looked up and thought this one would be good to add to the collection!

Schedule for tomorrow

Toby Huffer (GBR) & Ondrej Styler (CZE) vs Christian Cummings (IND) & Rishi Reddy (IND) – 5th match after 8.30am (not before 1.30pm)