Woo mr.truck is in favour of the 28 hour day - we'll take over the world eventually and convert them... one day we will! I mostly play sets. And I think I should explain this. Early on we used to practice and rarely play sets, or actually we used to practice for an hour and a half or two and just play one set. Well what we found was we play much much better in practice - obviously since you are relaxed, nothing at stake natural cuz it doesn't matter. So we decided to play more sets. And we still practiced before the sets but the practice got shorter and shorter - reason for that being we played high school tennis, and in highschool you basically go from a whole day of school to a tennis match with only 10 minutes of tennis warmup allowed. And I was a very slow starter, I usually wouldn't get into comfort zone halfway through the second set which is bad news and one of the main reasons I did so bad in highschool (also the fact that I sucked..). So ultimately we are right now at a 15-30 minute warmup/practice and play sets cuz ultimately you gotta be able to produce when it comes to matches. And since we play so many sets, the sets sorta became like practice and allthough we play now like say X sets per month, only about half or less of them are seroius and the rest are pretty much like practice sets. But that limits growth, you need repitition and practice and stuff like that to get better. We did start bringing hoppers and alternated each day with pracitce and sets but it soon went downhill. so its like that. I am in favour of good practice sessions like 2 or 3 of them for every 1 match I play. I think its important. But .. I guess we need to step up the seriousness level and take that extra inconvenience and maybe overcome the lack of motivation to practice.
And now that I only get to play weekly, i want to get playing you know what I mean? I want a match, not work on my strokes which'll again suffer from the long break (especially with winter coming up).
Next summer.
we played 4 sets today. I won them all, 6-3 6-1 6-1 7-5. I played really.. how do I describe this. I didn't try today. I tried to just go out there and enjoy, I didn't care if i won or not or how I was playing, I wasn't serious. So naturally I was really relaxed, loose and comfortable. So in a way I played much better cuz I wasn't trying, my groundies were more free flowing and smooth cuz I wasn't trying to do anythign with them besides hit them where I want. So in a way I think I cheated today cuz I played better by not trying wheras my opponent was clearly playing seriously and his poor play impacted him more and it could have made him play worse or frustrated etc.
I mentioned this to Dmast and I stuck to it - I didn't heat up my shoulder at all except for one game at the very end of the fourth set. My shoulder feels like it hasn't done one thing. I just used proper form but used no arm strength at all and just placed my serves in nicely - no power whatsoever. I probably got like 90% or more "first serves" like this in.
He actually stayed back on my serve so we got to play real tennis, as in forehands and backhands instead of another servefest. This is kinda surprising because my serve today he could have outright destroyed and come to the net and instead he returned them and played from the baseline. Naturally he returned a lot more because of my serve, but still missed a lot (and the scoreline speaks for itself, he could have and should have broken me every single game and forced me to fire my serve up), so I actually don't consider it a good returning day for him.
He didn't get his serve going until the fourth set. And I have mentioned this to him plenty of times, his serve is his main game. Anything less than that nice serve of his.. the scoreline speaks for itself. He started getting them in in the fourth set and I had mroe trouble returning and so I couldn't break him until 6-5. I returnd relatively poorly I think - relative to the quality of his serves last two three times we played and the percentage i was able to get back. But then again the ones I did return I think I returned better, because I am now used to much better serves from him and today wasn't anywhere close to it. He did force me to return a lot lot lot of backahands and that was harder.
The ground game was pretty average. I had some nice forehands and backhands and a few that I missed that I shouldn't have. Seeing how I haven't hit more than 5 fh/bh per match in ages (exageration alert) I think this is allright. I am really liking my backhand groundies. I missed a few today by hitting them all on the top edge of the frame, I am happy that at least I was consistent with this error and its just a slight adjustment that I need to figure out. I am trying to drive my backhands a little more, a little more depth and maybe more 'zip'. It has to penetrate like my forehand does. A few times today I consciouly tried to maintain depth so I had a few errors like that. Its allright.
I am satisfied. I hope he writes his side of the story.
