Today, June 20, Thursday my tournament finally began. I played singles and doubles. My singles was scheduled not before 1:30 on court 8, but was moved to court 2 because matches were running late on court 8. I won pretty handily. Every match here has a chair umpire and one ball boy who does quite a lot of running since there are only three balls per match and the courts are pretty big. The chair umpire calls all of the lines (but apparently not foot faults).
Our doubles was scheduled not before 4:30, but the match before our match went on for a very long time, considering it was no-ad scoring and doubles! We finally got on between 5:30 and 6pm. I met my doubles partner, Tia Zeta, who is a singles player from Peru. She is super fit, serves underhanded due to a shoulder injury and does not speak English, so our communication was interesting.
We played Mariana Metola and Carla Bergamo of Argentina. Mariana is a very good doubles partner, a former world champion I think and Carla got better as the match progressed. We won the first set 64, winning both deuce no-ad points; lost the second set, losing 3 of 4 no-ad points and won the tiebreak 10-1! We adjusted, they adjusted, it was a good match under the lights. The lights weren’t too bad but were right in my eyes when I served.
Tomorrow we play the doubles final not before 2pm and I play my singles semi against Elizabeth Mercado, who upset #3 seed Fritelli, 75 ret.
That’s a wrap on Thursday in Peru…no change in the weather…mild, 60s no sun, no wind.