Today the 71st Annual Klosters Senior tournament began for me. I had a bye yesterday which was nice, since some of the late matches were rained out. I was the 5th match not before 2pm, but I arrived around 1:15 or so at the club, only to find that only one match had been completed on the court and the second match split sets sometime after 1:30! So I went to watch my doubles partner play…then heard my name called. We were moved to another court and actually played around 2:30 which was nice (though it meant Center Court was left with no women’s matches all day). The moral of the story is to be ready by the “not before” time!
I played Barbara Von Oppersdorff and won pretty handily. It turned out she only had an occasional good serve and not a good second serve, though she had some tricky forehand and backhand slices and wasn’t afraid of the net. It turns out that Barbara spent four months in San Diego in her 20s learning Spanish. I don’t know about her Spanish but her English is excellent. She has a vacation home here, I can’t think of many more lovely spots for one.
There are a lot of Aussies here. They like to travel! Here are Leanne Swaysland (right) and Sue Ellis who are playing on the 55 & 60 teams respectively in Ulm next week.
The doubles draw has been changed twice since yesterday. There were six teams, two round robin groups of 3; a 4th team was added to one group (meaning we couldn’t finish by Friday); then it was turned into a knock out draw which means Kerry Ballard and I, as the top seeds, got a bye and play tomorrow not before 3pm. There’s a player dinner tomorrow night, so they are trying to finish things a bit earlier tomorrow.