Alec Adamson's Tennis Journey

After finishing up 3 weeks of tournaments in the Midwest, I decided to add one tournament before Portugal. I had a whole week in between and I thought it was better to get a few more matches in rather than train for a whole week. It’s also tough to find players to practice with if you arrive too early as most players arrive 1-2 days before the tournament starts. I decided to play a $6400 money tournament in Tence, France. It was a cool place to play as it was held in a small town and a lot of people came out to watch so it was a neat atmosphere. It was a very quick-turnaround as I arrived in Paris Monday morning, took a 3 hour train ride, and then rode in a car for an hour. I had to play my first match the next day. This was a new challenge for me as I had to deal with jet lag and changing time zones with no time to adjust. I tried to not sleep much on the plane so that I would be tired and could go to bed at a normal time in the new time zone. The French ...

After winning the doubles title the week before I didn’t get much time to adjust to the conditions in Champaign as the doubles final finished Friday at 6PM and I was playing the next day on Saturday. The Champaign Futures was held at the University of Illinois and they have a great setup. They  have one of the top 10 facilities in the country with 20 outdoor courts and 6 indoor courts. At a lot of Futures it can be tough to book practice courts as they are usually limited but in Champaign they didn’t even have a sheet to signup for practice courts since they had so many. I stayed at an AirBNB in Urbana for the week and it was only 10 minutes away from the site. I played my first Rd of Qualifying against Myles Schlaet who just graduated from the University of Michigan. He played #3-4 singles his senior year. He has a big game with a good serve and big forehand and he likes to finish points at the net. It was very windy the first day with winds of 15-20 mph. I...