Sunday 30th March 2014
Happy Mother’s Day to all the British Mum’s out there!
We had another very good training day today as we put the final touches to our preparation before main draw starts tomorrow.
As Katie had a long 19 hour day yesterday we decided that she would have a bit of a lie in today and so we met at breakfast at 8am. We then headed over to the tournament site and went through our physical warms up and a few footwork drills before getting on court at 10am. Once again Katie produced a very high level of training and she really built on the areas of her game that we had discussed yesterday. We spent the first 45 minutes hitting together where she warmed up and then went through some specific work based around her aggressive gamestyle before finishing the session by playing some points with Emilie Francati from Denmark.
Once we were done we headed over to the main football stadium to shower and change and then headed off site for lunch at Panera Bread – the food was pretty good but the portions were a little small for us!!
For our afternoon session we were once again joined by CiCi Bellis and, like yesterday, we knew that we were going to have a very good hour of practice with her. Katie and CiCi worked very hard together and it was great to see two girls putting everything into their training for the whole of the session. The format of the training today was almost identical to yesterday; the girls drilled for around 30-40 minutes at a very high level and then we finished the session with a service game each from either end of the court to get used to the windy conditions.
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Katie looking strong behind her return of serve today against CiCi
Once we had finished Katie and I sat down on the grass behind the practice courts to discuss the session in detail and also talk through the main areas we want to focus on tomorrow in her first round match. We then headed to the Velodrome to go through a light fitness session that is part of Katie’s fitness programme when she is on the road. I always find that a major difference between the juniors and the pros is the amount of physical training they do when on the road a tournaments – juniors tend to view their training as just on court hitting balls and the stretching whereas the pros know that they need to keep maintaining their strength and conditioning even when playing high level events. Even though the session for today was reasonably light it was still a very beneficial session and was an important part of Katie’s preparations for this week.
After the session we cooled down and went through a thorough stretching session to make sure that Katie would recover well for tomorrow. By the time we had finished in the gym it was around 5pm and, after checking that sign-in and everything had been completed, we headed back to the hotel.
We were both pretty hungry tonight and were looking forward to the hospitality buffet dinner but due to a mix up with the hotel and the tournament there wasn’t any meals arranged!! Rather than wait two hours until they sorted something out we headed across the road to Chipotle (along with half the players!) to have a very good meal there! During dinner the draw came out and Katie plays Jenna Friedel from America who I know well from the events in the Caribbean last year.
Girls Singles Main Draw
Schedule for tomorrow:
(11) Katie Swan (GBR) (109) vs Jenna Friedel (USA) (193) – 3rd match after 8am (not before 10.30am)
