The Season: Part Three

The winter is always a worrying time as a coach. There's not much fun to do during the winter if you can't play indoors, and unfortunately Bethany has not been blessed with a large indoor tennis facility. Snow falling seems to lead to attention and passion lagging, you feel like you are dragging people to get them to the weight room and stay focused on the vision that was so fresh at the end of the season.

That pretty much describes it. Throughout the snow season I checked off the days until we could start open courts again. I knew that some of our players were still playing indoors every now and then. Daniel had gotten a junior membership for Christmas, so he would get onto the courts whenever he could. Luke, Jared, Jonny, Seth were involved in lessons and therefore I would often find them out taking advantage of the free court time that accompanies that.

But I worried. Where were the NorthWood players playing, and how much? I mean, we were confident that we could be a good team. But honestly, I knew that NorthWood could still beat us in the Sectional. They returned 5 of their 7 players, and they had 3 positions back that they had beaten us at during the season. Two of those positions we had never beaten them ever. So it seemed like they might be ahead of us as far as favorites for another Sectional title.

I don't know what being the underdog makes everybody else feel like, but it makes me work harder. I felt like we needed to get ahead, especially at a couple of positions, to make sure that we could win, specifically against NorthWood. They had beaten us twice in close matches at #1D, so I felt like we needed to improve there. They had beaten us once at #2S, once at #2D, and once at #3S. I wanted to make sure that we were much better than them and secure these spots as certain points. If we could do that then we would be good to go.

The problem is that winter is also the season of doubts. It is furthest away from the actual competition, so it is the part where you can continually question your vision, how much work is going into it, etc. I never saw Jeremy and Johnny working on their tennis games during the winter, didn't talk to them too much about it, so I began to doubt them. I watched Jared lose to Luke one afternoon and wondered if Jared was going to be good enough to secure us points at #2S. I wondered and pondered and watched. I waited and waited and waited. There is simply no way in the winter to judge where you are at.

That's a most frustrating thing. And yet, could we keep working? This is what I questioned the most. When times get tough, when practice gets boring, when the vision is far from fulfilled, will we do footwork drills? Will we lift weights? Will we make the effort needed to secure court time and space? It's going to be an issue ever winter that we move through. I knew that this team of guys was special, but would they make the special efforts, be dedicated to the work?

I can't say that I would answer this with a definitive yes. I know that some guys were very dedicated. I know for sure that others were not. Some guys didn't come to team workouts but said they were working out on their own. I'll never know if they did. It was such a season of uncertainty, a clouding, a mystery.