The Match (long thing about tennis)

On Saturday I played my first official tennis match. It was official in the since that it was scheduled. It was against the UCSD Chinese tennis club. We spent parts of the last month practicing in order to play. Of course this wasn't traditional tennis practice but more like playing matches against other members from our group and playing with your partner in the case of doubles.

This was my case. I had a partner, Tan, who is a really cool dude. During our first practice match we did really well. During the second we did horribly. We tried working together but the second match really brought our self-esteem down.

The match was at 4pm on Saturday. I was a little nervous so went out Saturday morning and practiced some groundstrokes and serves. It didn't help at all as I was all nerves when I arrived at the UCSD tennis courts that were really nice. Tan and I warmed up next to UCSD men’s tennis team and I suddenly felt intimidated. So, I was intimidated, nervous and confused as the people who organized the event got everyone paired off.

Tan was also affected, as we had no confidence from the beginning. We lost 0-6, 1-6. Pathetic. And it wasn't that our opponents kicked ass, it was more that we did awful; constantly hitting the ball into the net or out and each unforced error caused havoc with our esteem.

Talking to Tan after the match he said he was having problems hitting what I call bubble balls. These are soft shots that float over the net. The first team we played during practice hit the balls with a lot more pace than the other two and we were able to handle them. I think this is a result of singles players trying to play doubles. I feel like I don't understand doubles well at all. I know an important part is to form a bond with a partner but that is hard to form over two three matches. I wish we had talked about the bubble balls before or during the match because I realized if we attempted to return bubble balls instead of trying to put pace on the ball we would have had a much better game.