After the previous weekend of back to back 3 set battles I was definitely feeling discourged with the beginning of my season. The shadow of those matches loomed over me as I approached this new opponent. This week I assurred that I was well rested and prepared for the match at hand. I played Justin at the St. Pete Tennis Club. I had not played there before and it was nice to play somewhere new. Of course on Sunday most of the courts were full and there were lots of younger people playing some competitve tennis. I felt old.

I arrived on time and began warming up. I always suck at first and during the warm up Justin was hitting very well. He hit nice ground strokes that were landing deep in the court. They had lots of spin and bounced high. I was concerned. I noticed he was a lefty and made a point to mention it to him during the practice. I like to do this so my opponent knows I am thinking about it. I took control of the practice session though and worked on some vollies and then serves. 

The first set we started by winning on each others serve. I was winning on his because his service game was really off. I do not know the count on double faults but it was pretty high. On my side I was getting my serves in early but my strokes were not good initially. I kept falling away from shots and seemed to land a lot of balls in the net. At one point during the first set he was up 3-2, I knew this was a critical time in the match and pushed myself to tighen up.  I started putting some more pace on my serve and changing between a flat and spin serve. This seemed to work. Also I noticed that he had the most trouble with serves hit right at him. This realization was an important one during the match and I did not lose on serve after noticing this point. Even if this theory was not entirely true the fact that I was focused on this new aiming point seemed to imporve my overall server percentage. I managed to crawl out of the 3-2 deficit and win the first set 6-4. 

The 2nd set I was able to control the points fairly well. I got a lot more approach shots in this time then last weekend and I would charge the middle of the court. This seemed to work most of the time. The more deliberate my move to the middle the better as he seemed to look up and hit an error in many of these situations. He pointed it out to himself a few times saying "I took my eye off the ball...", of course I was listening and kept doing this. The times it did not work seemed to be when the approach was poor and/or I moved too close to the net. I also was not getting my racquet squared up at the service line and a few times and missed because the ball just bounced off the angled racquet face. I did not do this in practice but it seems to come up in the match. The points I lost during this set were close for the most part. I know the last game I was up 40-0, all from serve points which were not returned in, then I lost 2 straight points and was at 40-30. I psyched myself up to get a good first serve in that was directly at his body and the match ended on an error into the net. I won the 2nd set 6-3.

Final was 6-4, 6-3. Hopefully Justin will call sometime and we can practice. I think he had an off day and I had an on day which sometimes happens in tennis. I think if we were both having an on day then we would have played 3 sets...not sure of the result though, guess we will have to wait and see.