Craig Cignarelli’s Court News
In the 1990’s, tennis academies started popping up, like meerkats, all around the country. Playing off the successes of Bollettieri’s model, Russia’s Spartak, Hopman’s Saddlebrook site, and Sanchez-Casal’s place in Spain, single-court facilities, where one coach taught three or four students, suddenly become academies.
I’d love to start tonight’s entry by saying both girls won, but that didn’t happen. With the mosquitoes leading 27-2, it’s been a rough day in the trenches.
The girls made the cut for this week’s tournament and qualifying starts tomorrow, although their intro to pro tennis comes with its attendant difficulties.
Ate a Teppan restaurant here in Mexico last night, the ones where you sit ten people to a table and the chef/Samurai warrior builds little onion volcanoes that he sets aflame so everyone at the table can “ooh” and “aah “as he burns off his eyebrows.
It’s rarely good when a person says, “I think I’m about to die.” But then, as a coach trying to expose younger players to the work required for professional advancement, those words are evidence of success.
Around 9:00 p.m. last night, one of my fifteen year-old students played her first professional tennis match. Meanwhile, the other fifteen year-old I brought with me, sat observing, learning and hoping to get into the draw as an alternate.
The girls didn’t get into the event. They are bummed out but energetic enough to rise early, so we are eating breakfast at 7:00 a.m. We plan a day in Play del Carmen before getting back to hit this….
Since it’s dusk and I’d like to enjoy a Caribbean sunset, I’m going to forego structure and just brain dump on this one.
This is week two of a multi-week segment of ITF professional circuit futures tournaments. These are combined events, meaning men and women play side by side. And so, because tennis players’ grunting and shrieking tend toward the suggestive, and since the courts are behind an opaque row of hedges, several curious tourists have poked their heads into the scene wondering just what exactly the hell is going on here.
That I’m traveling across the Mexican border, with two fifteen year-old girls sporting short skirts and enough sunscreen to enshroud a large moose, is not how I imagined surviving my mid-forties.
Was sitting on the beach this weekend – waves licking the shore, dolphin fins prairie dogging through the waves, soft sands shimmering. Twenty minutes before sunset, several seagulls appeared. Perhaps it was the crumbs left from tanning beachgoers or a final sand crab search before retiring for the evening.
Change begins with a thought, a voice, an action launched into the sea of humanity where it strikes the water’s surface and submerges into the deep.
This nation loves its heroes, and sporting personalities meet the requirements more than most.
Please place seven newly strung, well-stenciled rackets into your bag, rubber bands at the handle to hold the plastic in place.
Dawn’s light slides beneath my hotel curtains and, before bleary eyes, my ground’s pass resolves into focus. In a few hours, the second week of the US OPEN will begin.
« Previous Page — Next Page »
