Off to south America

So I won't be attending the 2011 Osaka International due to what happened over in Japan earlier this month. I will now be attending the 2011 Peru international challenge which is taking place April 14-17.

There are 75 guys signed up for men's singles with only 32 spots in main draw. This means that there will be either 4 or 8 qualifier spots made available so either 24 or 28 of the guys will get into main draw based on the current world ranking. The rest of the players (including me) will have to play 3-4 matches in qualifiers to obtain a spot in main draw.

This will be another great experience for sure. The only downside is i will only be in Lima,Peru for 2 days which will be taken up by the tournament. As well it will take a full day of travel to get there and a full night of travel to get back. Not to long after this tournament at the end of May I will be flying off to Asia to train in Indonesia for a month. The draws will come out soon for the tournament so I will most likely post them up here when they do.

So right now my schedule is just trying to prepare for this tournament. Its a big one but there will be many more like this in the future for me, I can only hope anyways. The biggest thing that is going to hamper my play will be unforced errors, and consistency under pressure so I have been training those for the past while and we will see how it goes in the tournament.

A New Start

It has been a while since I have used this site; I am now going to start up blogging as regularly as I can. I’ll talk about my travels to tournaments and as well of training and all other aspects of life.

I have been so busy lately that I haven’t had time to be a “normal” person as I like to call it. I have seen friends here and there but it’s usually just the passing by hi and a quick 5 minute (ok that’s being optimistic) conversation about how life is going. Then I have to run off to either one of the few classes I have or off to the club for training. Training takes up the greater majority of my day with minimum 2 hours on court a day (ranges from 2-4 hours) and then another hour in the gym for weights and one more hour for fitness/cardio type workout. On top of that there are 1-3 hours of school depending on the day and then 2-3 hours of work coaching as well depending on the day.

I’m not complaining about it, I know that I choose this and I have my goals that I want to meet. I would like to compete in the 2014 Commonwealth games in Glasgow, Scotland. After that I would potentially like to try and qualify for the 2016 Olympics. That is 3 and 5 years away from now but it will all be determined by what I do today and tomorrow, etc. To get me one step closer to my goals I will be traveling to Asia once again this summer to train there for a couple of months. My coach (Ardy Wiranata, 1992 Olympic silver medalist and winner of countless other prestigious titles) was able to arrange for me to train in Indonesia.

To facilitate all this I will be playing more internationals in the coming years and this summer as well. The current line up for 2011 is as follows, how closely I will be able to follow it is unsure yet.

April 6-10, 2011: Osaka International Challenge (as long as it’s still on)
July 12-16 2011: US Open Grand Prix Gold
July 19-24 2011: Canadian Open Grand Prix
August 31-September 3 2011: Carebaco International
September 8-11 2011: Cuscatlan Open International
November 9-12 2011: XIII Miami International
December 13-17 2011: Canadian International Challenge

It is a big list of tournaments and will be a tough year as well since starting in May of 2011 it is Olympic qualification period for the 2012 London games. That means that there will be a lot of big names making it out to tournaments to boost their world ranking. The only thing that will keep me back is funding which is why I am always looking for sponsors but it’s a circle of you need results to get sponsored but need money to go to tournaments to get the results. So for the time being we will see how this goes, that’s the tentative schedule though.

So that’s the start of everything, As of Thursday March 10, 2011 I am ranked 554 in the world for men’s singles. My goal for the end of the 2011 year is to be ranked in the top 200 in the world. Well it all starts here so I will keep this updated as best I can with everything that is happening.