Monday 9th May 2011
It was a relaxed day today as we got everything packed up and relocated (for the 5th time on the trip!) to Boca Raton where we’ll be spending the next 4 days preparing for the Delray Beach ITF.
After an early start yesterday we had a bit of a lie in today having breakfast at 8.30am. Then it was a chance to sort out all of our clothes and get them all washed and packed up so that everything was clean going into our training week. We made the most of the laundrette on site at the Holiday Inn, it was pretty cheap to wash everything but the dryers took forever! After it was all finally done we packed the car and headed just over an hour north to Boca Raton to our hotel for the next two weeks – it’s going to be nice to spend some time in one place as we were starting to feel like Nomads!
This afternoon we decided to head over to Delray Beach to check out the tournament site and we were really impressed with what we saw; another immaculate park club with 24 green clay courts and a modern clubhouse. What we were rather disappointed with was they want to charge us $21 per session for us to train there this week – if we did 2 sessions a day until Thursday that would cost us almost $150 so we decided to head back to Boca Raton to the USTA Training Centre Headquarters to see if they might be able to help us out.
USTA Headquarters, Boca Raton
It was the first time that I’ve been to any USTA national training centre (apart from Flushing Meadows) and I was very impressed by what I saw. It wasn’t a lavish tennis centre that looked as though it costs tens of millions of pounds but it had everything you needed there including a great atmosphere. There are 14 green clay courts, 9 hard courts, a reasonably sized gym (that had everything you might need) and all of the facilities that players need to live and do school work etc. The most impressive thing was that everywhere you looked there were quotes by top American athletes; every wall in the gym and on the sides and back of every court were reminders about how hard you need to work and how dedicated you need to be to make it.
I wasn’t sure how the staff would react to a foreign coach and a player they didn’t know walking in and asking to use their facility but everyone of them were fantastic; they’ve allowed us to use the courts and the gym all week and we’ve arranged for Devan to play matches every afternoon with the girls based there. It was really nice to be welcomed in that way – I wish it was like that with every national association.
We had a great training session and Devan hit the ball really well – it was hard not to perform well with top ITF ranked players training alongside you and a really positive buzz in the air. As we finished training I couldn’t help but notice a girl training against a wall on the court next to us; she’d been doing it for about 45mins and her intensity didn’t drop one bit – how many juniors do you know that would be as disciplined and work as hard as this when they’re on their own:
The desire and attitude to make it?
After we were done we headed back to the hotel and then out for dinner at The Cheesecake Factory (before you think it, no we didn’t have any cheesecakes!!). While we were waiting for our table we bumped into one of the USTA coaches that I met last week in Daytona Beach, he was again really friendly and offered for his girls to play practise matches too – everyone wants a piece of us!! Our meal was actually really good and the menu was huge so we might be going back a few times in these two weeks (just for your information there are 33 different cheesecakes on the menu as well as a series of “weight management” meals!).
