[Breeze]

Glenncree vs. Northern Oaks

My first match of the year was a subdivision about 3 miles down the road from my home courts, and both are about about equidistant from my house. It was nice not having to drive across North Georgia to get to the match.

I was playing the 3 line. The ones and twos both lost in tightly contested matches with no more than 1 break of serve separating any of the sets.

Met my partner about 20 minutes before we started, which is always fun. I took the deuce court side. While I don't really care which side I play, I was on the deuce court for all of the senior season over the summer, and with lack of court time recently, we figured the more comfortable I could be the better.

During warm ups, I couldn't see what my partner was doing, but what I saw from the opponents was - good top spin forehands from both, and both had very nice, hard, cut serves. Net play was solid as well. Didn't really see enough backhands to make a determination. Following the warm up, I felt we were going to be in for a tough match, as they seemed to play a very similar style to me.

We won the toss, elected to serve, and my partner did the honors. We won his service game quickly. Then we broke their first serve at 15. I served and won quickly and in less than 10 minutes we were up 3-0. At this point, they appeared to be shell-shocked. They held the next service game, but we then closed out the set at 6-1. Second set, they started with the serve, and we immediately broke the guy that held serve in the first set, and then we followed that up by running our lead out to 4-0. We cake walked it from there, winning 6-1 in the second set as well.

The match seemed to hinge on a couple of items:

- my partner had a very nice cut forehand, and he generated a lot of angle, which put them out of position a decent amount of the time.

- while they both hit nice topspin forehands, neither was as consistent as I was, and I just kept the ball deep in the court, and they would eventually end up with an unforced error.

- I believe, by jumping out to a quick lead, they started to press a bit. Trying to be perfect and hit bigger shots, which contributed to the high unforced error total.

We ended up winning at the 4 and 5 line as well, to win the match 3-2. We doubled our point total for the season, but are still tied for last place. It does look like our schedule was a bit front loaded, as our remaining matches are all against bottom half teams, so we could do well the rest of the way and end up middle of the pack in the overall standings. Of course a lot of that will be dependent on who's available to play.