Photo Gallery | Follow Irina Falconi at The Heartland Clinic USTA Women’s Classic – St. Joseph, Mo.
Rising sophomore and All-American Irina Falconi has agreed to blog for RamblinWreck.com this summer. She will keep Yellow Jacket fans up-to-date on her training as she prepares for her second season on the Flats.
July 28, 2009
Entry #10
It’s near bedtime for me, but blogging has become a “right-before-I-go-to-bed” must!
Today was a pretty slow and relaxing day. Not that there is anything wrong with that! But they just don’t come by very often—if they do, they rock!
The morning started off with a new found friend, Chichiro from Japan, asking specifically to warm up with me. I happily obliged to warm her up at the break of dawn for her match. No biggie—I’m a morning person.
So after our 45 minute warm up, I decided to hop back in the shuttle to get a ride back to the hotel. Once I got in the room, I saw that Ashley was still getting ready for her practice with my teammate, Christina. After a nice quick shower, I was in bed getting ready for my Law and Order SVU Marathon.
After about 10 hours of watching SVU, I finally got the motivation to head back to the courts to play for a second time with Ashley, Yasmin, and Maria. We decided that we were going to play a doubles set which was very convenient for Ashley and I, since Maria and Yasmin had won the Evansville Doubles Tournament only last week.
During our session, Ashley and I practiced for about an hour before heading over to Yasmin and Maria’s court to ball kid for them until they were done with their tie breaker. After our intense doubles set, we got together with Kathy Sell, one of the USTA Head Coaches, to do some agility and footwork followed by some sprints. After that, we realized that our 45 minute hit had turned into a two hour practice session. We then stretched, changed and headed to Kathy’s car to find a good place to eat. After some “touristy” driving through City Hall and Downtown, we all decided to try something new and original—54th Grill and Bar. We all enjoyed the scenery, the food, and the prices 🙂
Tomorrow the matches will start at 9 a.m. because of the rain delay today. Unfortunately the rain was so bad, the ITF Supervisors stopped play at around 1 o’clock because it wasn’t slowing down at all. I will be on 4th after 9 a.m. tomorrow for singles, and doubles will be 6th after nine. Let the games begin!!
