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Hollow Rock Senior Championships Durham, NC So far, this has been the nicest facility I've been to for a tournament. The Hollow Rock Tennis and Swim club holds the Senior Championships (local event) each year. This club has about 18 clay courts and a couple of hard courts. They have a "center court" designed for excellent viewing and a really nice clubhouse. Unfortunately, my play could not match my surroundings, as I lost in the first round - something I hadn't done yet in my 50s Singles tour. Two things let me down - my service return and my consistency. I also missed a few short shots because I "ran through them" instead of setting up for the kill first. The guy I played had a hard first serve, but he didn't get too many in. That's good and bad. It's bad because I could not get adjusted to it since he hit it so rarely. I suspect I only got 60% of his first serves back at best. He was a lefty, and his second serve was a big kick serve. This took me at least two games to get used to, since it kicked high and into my body on the ad court, and away from me and into the fence on the deuce court.
Outside of this though, they guy moved very poorly, and was on the defensive most of the game, pushing the ball back and moon balling me with more frequency than I had ever seen before. It seemed like this was his answer when I started putting pace on the ball - lob it to throw off my timing. Since I still was serving underhand, I also could not hit any overheads, so I had to just hit a groundstroke back (the way to get someone to stop this is to put away a few overheads in a row). Anyway, I started getting a bit frustrated, and my consistency went by the wayside, and I started making quite a few unforced errors - I lost 6-3, 6-3. My sister lives in the area, so my niece came and filmed some of the match. This was important, as I could see that one of the reasons I made so many groundstroke errors was that I got "tight", and didn't swing "freely". I was stopping my follow through short, and not hitting out the way I do in practice (a habit I've been trying to break from the very first tournament match). The next day I was able to play in a consolation tournament. This was an excellent feature of this tournament, since it gives everyone more opportunities to play, even if they lose early like I did. I was most committed to hitting the ball the way I “normally do”, and probably did that 75% of the time. I played better the second day, but still lost 6-1, 6-4. My return of serve was much better, but my ground strokes were still inconsistent. After the match, my opponent apologized for "just retrieving", as I had him on the defensive every game – including most points when he served. However, he would just hit one more ball. He also said “I admire you for going for your shots like you do. I just don’t seem to be able to do that”. While it was some consolation that I was “true” to myself – a big goal of mine since the first tournament – it was not very satisfying to lose to someone I had on the run from the first through to the last game. Nevertheless, I would still rather lose playing the game the way I like to play it, than win pushing the ball and dinking it just to get the point. However, this was the last tournament where I would serve underhand. I was going to “get my serve back” next week, and begin to work again on consistency. I think I’m making mental progress (I think I really enjoyed the second match a good bit more than the first one), so I’ll take whatever I can get week to week. |
