How to teach a volley and birthday time!

9am started with fitness and a 1 mile run and an abs session. Even though Jeadan has a tournament this weekend we still have to keep her moving and fit. Today's main focus was her serve. Within the matches she has played her serve has let her down and therefore it was vital to practice this. It was a short morning, where we only played an hour or so. I had another task today of taking orders for the new merchandise for Lakeland today. I collected it also from the organization. These ranged from jumpers, t-shirts to caps all branded with Lakeland. This is a small but effective part of marketing. When players wear this merchandise to tournaments and they play well people can see where they play making them interested in the academy.

After this, I had my own lesson on how to teach a volley using a certain device. It was tied around your arm and attached to your racket to stop it moving in certain directions where it wasn't meant to. I have given plenty of lessons on how to teach the volley, but this was a very technical lesson which I can then pass down to players and also use this device. Little technical aspects I learnt is the angle of the racket and where you left hand is. This I do automatically when I play but wouldn't think to tell players this. I had the older players for academy today. All of them have tournaments tomorrow so again I played points against them focusing on certain aspects of the game they should be remembering.

Part of the business which I hadn't seen before I saw today. It was Daniels birthday! To celebrate the whole academy stopped and everyone came inside to enjoy cake and a drink. This I thought was great for all the players to have a half hour break and to mix with the other players. It makes the academy feel more like a community or family rather than the older and younger children.