I know I have not blogged about Week 6 yet, well I played this week before 6. The guy called me and wanted to play early so here I am. I play Week 6 tomorrow.

This week I played Jeremiah. He is new to the league but apparently played a lot when he was younger. First thing you need to know about him is he is 6'6" and in good physical condition. Even if he could not play tennis very well he would have been tough. That was not the case though, he was a player.

He knew how to come to the net and worked it often. When someone that size is at the net it seems nearly impossible to get something by them. During the 1st this seemed to get to me quite a bit. I normally do not play my best during the first set and if forced to make really good shots I tend to make errors. This was essentially the reason I lost the 1st set 4-6.

Throughout the match the thing that helped me most was his service game. He had a on/off style serve. It was either coming at you at 80+ mph or it was not going in. He doubled a lot. During the 2nd set I started to get a nice game going and at one point was up 3-1.

I started hitting my serves with a little more pace which also helped. I had noticed he was slicing my serves hitting sort of a drop shot return on them. Something you don't normally see but again because of his height he seemed to pull that shot off quite a bit. He would also follow this shot in so as your running up to hit this slice he is standing there casting a shadow over the ball. This made it even harder to hit a nice shot back, the angle made it impossible to hit an overhead so you were constantly forced to make some sort of passing shot. Hitting it harder on the serve seemed to foil this shot more often than not, also over time in the match I just started following my serve in a few steps as seemed to never hit a deep return. I won the 2nd set 6-3.

 During the 3rd it seemed like I was going to run away with it. I was up 3-1 again. Then out of no where his serve seemed to come back to him and he really began burning them in. This flustered me a bit and I ended up giving up a service game to him also. Finally though I managed to finish it off on serve and win the set 6-4.

Final 4-6, 6-3, 6-4. Nice 3 set battle, I am sure I will play him again if he stays in the league and he will be much tougher the next time.

The single biggest thing that I enjoyed about this match is that I adjusted to his slice return and over came it. Last season during the 1st round of the playoffs I faced an opponent who did the very same thing. I never seemed to adjust to it and lost in the first round. This time was different - woot!