I woke up today and realized it was one week before my Summer Junior Tournament will begin. Needless to say, I am quite excited as this is the first local tournament that I am playing against players that will be my age or older. So the experience that I will get from this event no matter how I do will be tremendous.

Leading up to the tournament and my matches I will continue my 2 hour practice sessions with my coach and in these sessions we really do not plan to change much of what we have being doing the past few months. My coach is the type of coach that takes a specific lesson and works it over and over in practice till I can practically do it in my sleep. The purpose of these sorts of lessons is so when I am in a match situation I know exactly at any time what is the best possible shot to deliver. Now if I am playing an opponent that I am dictating the points this works really well in my favor. If I am playing an opponent that has me on a string, then not so much.

So in today’s session after stretching we primarily worked on my approach shots and middle midcourt. My coach would hit balls to me that would bring me in and I would try and hit winners on my approach shot from the forehand or backhand with angles keeping him deep into his end of the court. If I was unable to hit a winner, I would then have to adjust and either retreat back to the baseline or approach the net and he would attempt to hit a passing shot or lob until the point would end. This way I got to work on my mid-range game, approach shots, volleys, overheads, forehands, and backhands. I even on one of his lobs attempted a “tweener” where the ball ended up hitting the inside of my leg. It did not work very well. The end of the session as we always do ends with some serving.

Tomorrow, I will share what my adventures were in practice and I hope you all enjoy my journey towards my tournament.