An early start on Saturday morning saw the team of Mia Wainwright, Charlotte Freeman, Valerie Cassidy-De Falco and Anneka Manocha arriving at Caunton Tennis Club at 8.30am. Being the first team there is always a good start to the weekend. Caunton is a great club with great people involved. It was great to see Dawn and Bob Maskill there first thing on Saturday morning with Dawn singing a bit of ABBA dancing queen around the clubhouse. First thing first was to find our team meeting bench and to set the tone for the weekend. Three key things were suncream, hydration and find shade! The latter being difficult in the scorching conditions. Our take home messages for the weekend were to have tons of fun, have the best team spirit and to develop our games.
The event had us competing against four other counties over the weekend. Each match consisted of 3 singles and 1 doubles at 2-2 a doubles tiebreak shootout would decide the winners. Standing in our way of a place in the finals were Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire.
Our results over the weekend were:
Win Derbyshire 2-2 won shootout
Lost Lincolnshire 1-3
Lost Northamptonshire 1-3
Lost Leicestershire 0-4
Leicestershire won the whole event with the loss of 1 rubber. They had 2 players inside the top 15 and were missing the number 1 in the country! We wish them luck in the finals
The girls were fantastic throughout the weekend and finished as stronger players than they started. In our little bit of downtime as a team we were found in the clubhouse playing headsup with a lot of noise. If you haven’t played the game we strongly suggest you download the app. Our weekend finished with team ice creams and a chat around favourite foods and who we thought would win Wimbledon and the world cup!
As Captain I am super proud of the girls no matter who they were playing and what the score they had amazing attitudes and smiles on their faces. All that’s left to say is mission accomplished!
Hollie Bambridge (Capt)