If you have ever seen those photos that compare the expectation and reality of success (cue the one with a sketch figure on a bike and checkered flag at the finish line) then you understand what I’m talking about. This sport is such a headache sometimes, my god.

Normal practice wise it’s been relatively quiet in the past 4 weeks due to the tournaments and July/August being the official holiday months in Belgium so my usual roster of hitting partners has been away. However, the few practices I had mid-July were actually great and believe it or not, in my notes described as fun(???). It’s cute how life consistently reminds me that you cannot beat a person who’s having fun and that’s exactly how it felt since I was playing, objectively speaking, great tennis those days. Other than that there’s been plenty of conditioning and footwork sessions, one of them also on court since I consistently pointed out my lack of ability to slide on clay. Well, I will be damned: I actually can slide but now it’s the matter of rewiring my brain from the default running to far balls to actually using the surface to my advantage. Even had a revelation regarding my 2nd serve and got a lot of valuable feedback which tripled it’s reliability in no time. Serve is always such a pain in the arse. They are NOT lying to you if they say it’s probably the hardest stroke to master. For me personally it’s a volley: I would love to have a word with the person who came up with it and properly cuss him out. Tennis trainer is out of the country until mid-September so the Sunday 8 AM practices are postponed until indoor season (I cannot wait to play on hard courts!!).

Realizing that the time to play the tournaments (before off-season starts in October) is now, I scrambled a bit to sign myself up for a few tournaments, the two of them being played back-to-back. In both cases won the first round with a really nice performance and lost in the second round with eh-meh type of playing. In first round matches it really felt like I had finally figured something out: winners were winning, serve was working (even if the 1st didn’t, the 2nd generally did) and I played smart tennis which included in a few cases taking the first set and avoiding the 3 set/2.5h abomination. Lo and behold comes 2nd round and half of it goes out of the window. Surprisingly the serve still held, especially during the latest tournament, but everything else just fell apart a bit at the seams and even though there were some good shots, the general picture was way more bleh then in the 1st round matches. If they ever crown the queen of unforced errors, I’m currently very much eligible for the title.

Generally it’s been very back and forth type of progress happening. Some areas are definitely improving and it’s inevitable that the learning process is a bit touch and go but then the established parts start being dodgy and the confidence replaces with frustration in a blink of an eye. Either ways, two more tournaments coming up, one starting this weekend and the other the first week of September. Will try to make these count and hopefully go into the off-season happy and healthy.

Hours spent on court between 13/07 and 09/08: 13.5h 

~ I postponed writing this unnecessarily long, my apologies – S.