Soft Doubles and Hard Singles

Sets 408-409:

Stuart v. T. at Hill Country Middle School.  Winner: Stuart 6-0, 6-3.

My Mojo:  Squishy For Doubles, Solid For Singles.

I started out playing doubles, but it was weird doubles.  There were five people, and we would rotate one person out and one person in after each game.  So after four games, each of us found ourselves on a different team.  I don't mind that for practice, but as competition it is just about useless to keep the game score.  So we didn't keep score of how many games were won or lost, we just kept the point scores in the games.  

After several games of this, I peeled off one of the players to play singles with me, and the other three played two-on-one.  At least I guess they did.  There weren't any courts open at Westlake High, so we moved to Hill Country Middle School down the street.  So I don't actually know what the people we left behind at Westlake did.

When I had been playing doubles, I was very tentative.  I didn't feel like I was playing that well, though the games that I served, whatever team I was on won fairly easily and we were able to grab the offense easily and keep it throughout the game.  So I guess I must have been doing something right.  But I didn't feel like I was very tuned in for doubles, and most of the games that I played the team I was on lost.  Of course, once again, it was stupid to think of it in terms of winning or losing since the teams shuffled around every game, but I guess I just can't help compartmentalizing things in that way.

When T. and I started paying singles, it was like the curtain rose and the scales fell from my eyes.  I was playing solidly, and in the first set I was able to maintain a pretty good offensive game.  My serve didn't seem to be giving me as much of an advantage as it had during doubles, but everything every other facet of my game was really well-congealed, and things fell into place easily.  And my serve was not bad, either.  For the first set, I took every game, and it seemed almost effortless.  I think we had one or two games that were contested, but I was able to close those without too many problems.

In the second set, his game stepped up, and mine loosened a little.  For the first six games, we each won our serve so the score was tied at 3-3.  The sixth game was also the most challenging game of the match as we went back and forth from deuce to ad a lot and also had long nailbiting points with many surprises.  Then I broke his serve, and from then on, I was able to win the rest of the games.