Nearly sprained my ankles, played doubles during interclub and listened alarming amount of Noah Kahan.

Theme of the last two weeks has been “how many games can you lose to unforced errors while dominating normal rallies 20min prior”. Besides the last one from this week, the usual practice/hitting sessions have not been it. Warm up and rallying feels relatively nice, no big errors and generally doing good things. Then we decide to play points and everything goes (for the lack of better words) to shit. Serve takes another unauthorized break from its usual duties and the actual rallies have more mistakes than a first grader’s spelling test. Suddenly half of the balls end up being overhit, all the direction changes are nowhere to be found and to top it off, wind takes the few balls that could perhaps still be good on a field trip outside said lines. The epitome of #pickastruggle

Last Saturday was for another interclub outing that on paper was more successful than the first one. I started with a singles match that we played in full heat (25 degrees with no shade is my definition of hell and definitely warm considering we are in Belgium after all) on this horrendous smash court where I was seconds away from becoming an olympic gymnast the way I was sliding around and unintentionally doing near splits. It took so much confidence away from my movement on court as I was genuinely scared to sprain my ankles and the match itself didn’t feel good at all. How I managed to win 6/4 – 6/2 is genuinely still a mystery to me. After waiting around for a few hours and watching everyone’s matches, it was time for an unexpected doubles debut but luckily this time we played on a normal clay court. To my own surprise I didn’t dislike it as much as I expected. My serve suddenly dialed in again and I hit some aces perfectly down the T that even made me raise an eyebrow. Thankfully my partner is way more experienced in doubles than I am so that helped a lot and I fumbled less than expected thanks to not trying to be a hero and not interfering with her shots. Another win in the bag with 6/2 – 6/2, some spaghetti bolognese in my tummy and made it home soaking wet from the rain because the thunderstorm rolled over during the last 5min part of me cycling back from the tennis club.

The day after it was time for another early morning tennis lesson. This time it was a lot about directions and repeating certain shots over and over again until it was consistent. Down the line shots are agonizingly easy to overhit and cross court was occasionally way too over rotated (besides being too short since my hands were spaghetti) but eventually it looked quite good and I didn’t fumble too much. Serves for some reason didn’t really work that well despite being amazing 16 hours prior but that’s life I guess  Played a few points at the end to make sure that I could implement the direction changes from the the first half of the practice and while this is the part of the lessons that I tend to tank 8 times out of 10, this time it actually worked out better than expected. Returns are starting to click and I didn’t try to overpower every shot during the rally either. I take my wins where I can.

All in all, great week in terms of interclub and very mid week in terms of practices. Taking it easier this and next week and playing less due to a packed social schedule (15yo ultra introverted me would get a heart attack seeing my calendar) but I think a little breather won’t hurt since from last week of May the tennis related schedule will pick up again. Meanwhile, I go to 3 concerts and hope I don’t forget how to hit a ball in the next week and a half 

Total hours on court in the last two weeks: 8

~ hoping the wind dies down and sun comes back out – S.