Chani brings it home!!

We played our opening match against Philadelphia last night. It is always very important to win your home games and the opening game of the season. The crowd at the Cooper Stadium have been really great and very supportive of the Lasers Team. The great thing about World Team Tennis is that it puts the players on stage every night, and you are out there playing for your team and not yourself. Here is a quick run down of a match night and some rules:

• 2 Men and 2 women in a team


• 5 Events are played, men's and women's singles, men's and women's doubles and mixed doubles


• The scoring is different from normal tennis. You play 1 st to 5 games with a 9 point tie-breaker at 4 all.


• No ad scoring, at deuce the returning team can decide which side they want to return from, and in mixed Doubles Gender serves to Gender.


• Before the match every player gets introduced to the crowd, and they play the national anthem.

The most important thing is that it is about the total amount of games and not matches that you win. The home team decides on the order of play. Last night we decide on the following order.

Mixed Doubles, Men's singles, Men's doubles, woman's doubles and we finished of with women's singles. I like to finish of with Chani because she is really good in this format and had a good season for the Lasers in 2008.

Martin and Chani started well and won the opening match 5-2, Raven played awesome tennis in his 1 st match of the season and won a close tie-breaker 5-4 (total score 10-6), At this stage I was very relaxed because I knew that if we can go into women's doubles with a lead, we had a good shot of winning the match. Martin and Raven come out and played 2 loose points and suddenly they where in trouble, and lost the match 5-1. Suddenly after been up by 4 games and cruising the total was now tied at 11 games all. I was getting nervous because our women's doubles on paper is one of the best in the league , but we where missing Vanis King who was still at Wimbledon playing in the quarterfinals against the Williams sisters. Our sub for the night was Blair Henley a college player who was now coaching at the local club. This was going to be very tough. The beauty about women's doubles is that you never know what is going to happen. Well Chani decided that it was going to be her night and she stepped up and produce a awesome display of doubles skills. the girls won 5-4 giving us a 1 game lead going into the final set. She carried on with her great performance in doubles, and won the singles 5-3 and clinching the match for us 21-17.

This was not the only excitement we had yesterday. In the afternoon Raven and myself where very lucky not to get injured in a car crash we where involved in. The owner of our team John Cooper took us to get our sponsored cars when some idiot came out of a side street without looking to the left and we hit him. He only realised we where there when we landed on top of his car. Thank goodness we where driving in a big SUV.

We have 2 rest days and play our next match on Sunday night against Kansas City.