Springbreak and second travel

Couché de soleil sur le trajet retour

The week after is springbreak. That means no class at all. Most of the students are traveling to exotic places and drinking alcohol and partying the whole week ,but for the tennis team the program is a little bit different. The international being the only student staying on campus the cafeteria is closed as the whole university. That means that we have to survive one week without being able to eat something, because we still do not have any car. But we already did it the first week we came here, so we are no more afraid of it. 

Tennis

In fact the tennis team has to stay on campus for the whole week because we have three matches in the next few days. We also have our daily practice from 2pm to 5 pm everyday. For the first competition of the week we are traveling with the team to Fort Smith, Arkansas. It is a three hours drive north-west of Durant. There we are staying one night in a nice Hotel and the day after are going to a country club, right next to a military base of the US Air Force to play our matches. The weather is hostile with temperature of about 3 °C and a cold wind. The team we are meeting is a fairly good team but are supposed to be better than them. The reality is something else. After a good start, all our player are beginning to lose their game and playing bad. At the end, the 5-1 defeat is cruel, but it is fair. We were a better team than us, but on the day of the competition, they played better than us. The girls who were playing in an other country club some blocks away lost their competition 5-4. We are heading back to Oklahoma with our first losses againt a div. II team. During this match, I played against a Brasilian player and we had to stop our match because of the already acted loss of my team. I was 7/6 4/3 down.

On saturday, we have the next match against an other team. This team is not looking to be very good and the result confirmed my first impression. We won 5-2.

On sunday, we are receiving the best team of the Region, ranked 12 in the nation. It is probably the best team that we are going to play this season before the national. Already at the beginning, the victory seems to belong to the other team and finally the 8-1 loss is clear. We were not ready to compete on this day. Most of the matches were very tough and our team mostly lost it because of the lach of physical training. But our "coach" if I can call it like this does not looks to understand it. 

On the few days after, we are also talking a lot in the team to try to look for the reason of those losses and to try to be better in the future. Our conclusion is that maybe, in double for example, we should try to change the team but our coach does not share our opinion. In fact, we do not really understand why he does not want to change anything in the lineup. But for most of us, we do not understand how can we be better without trying new things. It is maybe in those tough moments that we can best see the lack of experience of our coach. 

Life in Durant

The week-end right before spring break, we are going with some international students to do some camping in Thackerville, Ok, in the property of one University's student. We arrive there two hours later as expected because of a car trouble. The evening, we were able to shoot with different weapons, pistole in the garden of their property. I tried different ones: a sniper, weapon, a pistole. I will post some pictures under this post.

Aperçu de notre journée camping