[Brian Swartz]

Elsewhere ...

Manoj Datar's best futures event came this week, as on his favored grass he won the doubles and made it .... exhausted ... to the final in singles. Datar is probably under a month away from having his trainer allotment saved up. Sushant Srivastava has been training the last few weeks, but he'll be back out there next week. Ditto for Girish Raychaudhari.

Aparna Chandrasekharan has his first training week since I hired him on next week. He's played seven consecutive Amateur events. Losing mostly, esp. in singles, but he's finally reached the point where his match condition is back where it needs to be. It was an ugly and inefficient process, but he got there. He lost his first five singles matches and is still underwater in both singles and doubles. He did get far enough to get his first ranking point - singular, not plural - in both disciplines. 2520th singles, 3499th doubles for his rankings. It's actually going to be interesting because a strong player will end up playing 4-6 total amateur events and then move on to futures. But Chandrasekharan, even now that he's at full playing strength, isn't good enough to get past this stage yet. So he'll need to grind his way through improving enough to beat players that are, at this point, a cut above his level, and as a result I'll be spending more time in amateur than I have with previous players. I'd say the rest of this year and probably all of next year - or at least most of it - will be spent doing that.