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March 26, 2009

Ashley Playing In Latina-Nascosa

Ciao!

Sorry you didn’t hear from me yesterday…I didn’t get online much at all and it was really late by the time I got to bed. I ended up losing my singles match to (3) Zuzana Ondraskova 6-2, 0-6, 1-6. I know it’s a strange score. My main focus was to come out aggressive and play to win. I think I accomplished that for the most part. In the first set I was dictating points, hitting winners, and playing relaxed. Everything seemed to be going in and I got a little lucky here and there with bounces and such. I won the 1st set 6-2 pretty easily. In the 2nd set I was going after my same shots, but barely missing them this time around. Some net tape trying to attack off of returns and missing it wide or long in the rallies. We did have some close games that I should have won, but towards the end of the set I was just making too many errors. The 3rd set should have been closer as well. I had a few game point opportunities here and there, but didn’t get them. The last two games of the match was all her, she was getting me out of position and attacking. She was more consistent than me in the last set and a half and placing her ball well. She had a nice forehand and her backhand got more consistent as the match went on. She used to be top 75 in the World and right now inside the top 200 so that’s not too bad at all. Even though I’m not happy with the end result, I am happy that I came out playing more aggressively and more relaxed than last week. Plus I found my forehand! It went missing for a couple weeks which I was getting frustrated about. I hit it well in my singles match which was good and a mini victory in itself. I also served better than last week, having a pretty high percentage of first serves and only 2 or 3 doubles faults. So there were some good things to take away from the match and build on.

Our bus ride back to the hotel was pretty entertaining thanks to Kevin. His entire wine bottle leaked out in his bag and it was getting all over the place, we had to be quite creative to clean it up and the driver wasn't too happy with him. It was funny, you probably just had to be there. Megan and I really needed to do laundry, so we did that after my singles match. It was an adventure. We followed a map that the lady gave me at the front desk which wasn’t too exact, but we found it just fine. The only thing is that it was at least a mile away and I was carrying two giant bags of laundry while Megan was rolling her stuffed suitcase down the street. It was pretty funny. The laundry is not cheap here! We paid 4-6 euro per washer and dryer and we had 2 different loads each. And we had to dry our clothes twice because the first 40mins pretty much did nothing and they were still really wet, don’t you hate it when that happens? Oh and the coin machine thing was in like 4 different languages, it was quite interesting trying to figure out how to even get our wash started. We went to the supermarket and bank while we were waiting. Then finally our clothes were clean, we folded them, packed up, and walked back. All in all I think it was at least 4 hours haha.

As far as today goes…Megan and I won our doubles 6-2, 6-1. We played against the same team I played in doubles last week that took way too many match points to beat, 7-6, 6-7, 10-7. A little different this week which was good! Tomorrow we play the semis against my partner from last week, Marina Shamayko, and Ekaterina Ivanova. We’re playing well together so we’ll see what we can do tomorrow. We’re 2nd up not before 2pm. Wish us luck! I’m off to bed, goodnight!

Posted by Jack Newman at March 26, 2009 3:32 AM