On Friday morning, a group of eight of us from my tennis teams went down to Wintergreen Resort for a weekend of tennis clinics. We had done a trip last fall, and really had a lot of fun and learned a lot. This past weekend was more of the same!
On Friday, we had a clinic from 1 - 4pm, so we planned to arrive at our rental house by noon. Well, we drove into the mountains and the rain changed to pretty heavy snow! We got a couple of inches of snow in parts of the resort. Fortunately, the roads did not get too bad. The Friday clinic was a good review of the double strategies we had learned last October, plus some new drills. I love taking tennis clinics!
On Saturday, we had a clinic from 8 - 11am. At this clinic, we did some drills involving "awkward" volleys, which are volleys were you have to reach or stretch or react very quickly. This was excellent practice. It helped me kind of mentally sort these volleys into categories of how I react to them, which I think is the first step for me to play them better. In the afternoon, some of us (including me) went hiking, even though it was pretty cold out. We hiked a nice, scenic loop around some waterfalls and up a creek.
On Sunday, we had a clinic from 8 - 10am. A lot of this was review, which was good. It helps to keep playing and doing it so that it becomes ingrained. After the clinic, we drove home.
I really enjoyed the clinics again, and I think everyone else did, too. We have a group of twelve making the trip down in May. After that, I want to organize a trip for the fall. That may be too much for us to get twenty to go again, but hopefully we'll have enough for a trip.
When I got back from Wintergreen yesterday, I had a 3.5 match with my team that evening. We came so close to winning the match, which was against a very good team, but only won two courts. Whitney and I lost 7-6, 3-6, 0-1. In the first set, I got into some lobbing rallies with the other team, which wasn't necessarily a good thing. But then I remembered the strategy we learned at Wintergreen for dealing with lobs, and when I pushed back my opponent, I moved forward to take the next lob out of the air. This turned things around for us, and we got pretty aggressive at the net, with a lot of volleys and overheads. In the second set, our opponents switched sides, which somehow enabled them to hit better groundstrokes. We really floundered. I wanted to try to get the balls more "up" again, like in the first set, but Whitney really wanted to rally. I just didn't think that was working. We lost the second set. In the match tie-breaker, we quickly got up 4-1, but then they caught up. We made some unforced errors, and they hit some good shots, and we ended up losing the match tie-breaker 10-8. Sigh. I really feel like we could've won our match, and it would have gotten an overall win, too!
This morning, I did P90X3 The Warrior, preceded by Cold Start. This was an interesting workout, with an unusual sequence of moves, mixing cardio and bodyweight strength moves. I burned about 175 calories.
Today before class, my laptop died, taking a bunch of work stuff with it. I decided not to go to my tennis doubles tonight at TCCP so that I can re-make some of the stuff, but I really miss it. Sigh.
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