Saturday 3rd March 2012
Today marks a significant day for International Travelling Coach as over the past year and three months I have only travelled with players to junior events but today was the first day of my first senior event – the $15,000 Men’s Futures event in Tipton, England.
After a 3 hour drive from Kent I met Dave Hodgetts at The Tipton Sports Academy at 5pm this evening after he’d been in Shrewsbury playing for Hereford & Worcester in the LTA U18 County Cup competition. As Dave had already played a singles match today he just wanted to spend a little time getting used to the different surface at Tipton so we warmed up in the gym from 5 – 5.30pm and then had a really solid 40 minute hit on court until 6.10pm. I travelled with Dave last year to a junior ITF event in Bosnia and remember how hard working he was back then so I was pleased to see his application was still of a very high level today.
After we finished and had changed it was time to try and find somewhere for dinner while we waited for the draw to come out. Unfortunately (and partly due to it being a Saturday night near Birmingham) all of the local restaurants were very busy so we decided to give Dave’s mum a call and see if she could rustle something up in the 40 minutes it would take us to get back to their house!! By the time we’d got back our dinner was ready and on the table so we both tucked into a good home cooked meal – a real rarity when you’re on the road at tournaments so this was a great treat!
After dinner we checked the LTA website and saw that the draw and order of play had been released so we had a quick chat to plan the morning tomorrow before relaxing in front of the TV with Dave’s family.
Men's Qualifying Draw
Schedule for tomorrow:
Dave Hodgetts (GBR) (UNR) vs Sizya Ernest Kivanda (GBR) (UNR) – 2nd match after 10am
2nd Qualifying Round will be played later in the day
