As I mentioned in my previous post, my tennis partner and I played in our first doubles match today against some other co-workers. As expected, we lost badly by a score of 6-0, 6-1.
I knew things weren’t going to be ok when I broke a string on my racquet early on in the match. I can’t remember the last time I broke a string during play. It’d probably have to be when I was a teenager when I was playing with very old strings. Not sure what happened this time around. It could be my new racquet that caused that problem. It has fewer strings than a traditional racquet and thus a less dense string bed which could lead to higher forces per string. It’s also possible SportChek just does a terrible job at stringing racquets.
Anyways, I had to borrow another racquet and I actually played half-decent after that. I made a few mistakes but it could have been a lot worse. I think where I failed was that I didn’t prepare my partner for actually playing in-game situations. He found it difficult to volley at the net. We never practiced volleys because I just never thought it would be necessary. I’ve done a ton of volley drills dating back to my teenage years but it never occurred to me that my partner had never done those.
Afterwards, my partner also admitted to me that he wasn’t used to the pace of play. Again, I thought this wouldn’t be a problem because in doubles, there’s only half the court to cover compared to when we practice and it’s just ourselves. Doubles though is a fast game though, where you need to react to sudden volleys from the player at net. I probably should have prepared him for that.
Well, once I get my racquet strung again we’ll go back to practicing and I’m going to focus on all the doubles specific strategies and situations that we never went over before. Hopefully, next time we play, we’ll do a lot better.