I drove from Indianapolis to my parent’s house in Dayton on Saturday night and had a much easier trip to join my normal Sunday group. We had one new guy that I didn’t know, but everyone else was pretty much the normal group. I played with the same woman and man the whole time but with mixed we did play against everyone.
In women’s play we did well 2 games and not as well in the last game. I was pretty happy with how we played overall and how I did, especially since I’m still kind of shaken from how badly I did with yesterday’s experience. I was trying hard to let that go and trust myself again.
When we played mixed, I realized I hadn’t played mixed in 5 days. I was thinking, man I’d better do well with this because now I’m truly in a support role. I know my job and I know I can do it. I ended up with a lefty guy, which is not something I see often in most of my games, but I knew I could set him up just as much as I could a righty. I just had to figure out how to stay out of his way.
I managed to do just that. He did the majority of the work and I felt really good about how I set him up. Obviously, I made mistakes but once we started stacking with him on the right we did well. We won all of our games and it was a relief to have some wins and some confidence. I’ve gone a few days without either so it was a much needed bounce back.
I did have 2 ATPs on the day. One was actually off a serve so that was different. It wasn’t a real long ATP, they just served with such an angle that I just poked it down the line instead of trying to go over the net. There was no force or attack to it, just a different way to get it to the other side. The other ATP was the end result of a dink battle that served up an opportunity to my forehead.
I’ve got to really put some thought into what I’m going to focus on next. There are definitely things I have to work on after this past weekend and I’m going to address all of those. I’d like to start doing some extra workouts, just so I’m not tired at events. Fortunately at the event yesterday I wasn’t tired but I think it’s important to improve my stamina.
