Welcome back.  This past weekend we finished up the regular season of play.  It has absolutely flown by and seems like yesterday we were leaving for our opening matches on spring break.  On Saturday we left early for our 11:30am match against Middlebury.  It would be generous to say that we performed well below our expectations.  The team came out flat in the doubles and we paid the price going down early breaks.  On Court 3, Kevin and I went down 2 breaks to start things off and even though our play improved as the match continued we were never able to recover.  The story was similar at the other two positions and we ended up getting swept.  The singles started off in similarly poor form with all 6 courts dropping first sets.  Karol, Will, and I were able to take the 2nd set in our matches but by the time 3rd sets were ready to start, Middlebury had already clinched the match so we played superbreakers.  I came away with the lone win on the day, certainly one of the more bittersweet in my time at Williams.  With a tough loss, we weren't very happy about the prospect of a 3 1/2 hour drive to get to Hamilton for Sunday's match.  However, bad moods and short tempers can't last long, and we quickly found some humor to lighten the mood.

Coach Donn has been extremely fond of his GPS taking care of all the navigation for us, especially on unfamiliar territory during spring break.  It does have its shortfalls though.  As we left Middlebury the Garmin had us take an abrupt turn onto a single lane dirt road.  For several miles we traveled next to farms and within a few meters of cows on the rocky unpaved road.  Then up ahead in the distance we could see water, but interestingly, no bridge. As we approached the shore it became clear we would be taking a cable pulled ferry across Lake Champlain.   We had a few minutes before the ferry arrived and talked to a local at the rustic family owned ferry dock.  It turns out the ferry was in operation for 1st time all year.  Further, we arrived at 5:30pm, and the ferry closed at 5:45pm.  Luck? Karma?  Who knows but it did cut an hour off the trip time it would have taken to reach a bridge.  We crossed and landed next to Fort Ticonderoga and drove another 2 hours to Clinton, NY and spent the night ready to play Hamilton the next morning.  The Hamilton match took about 90 minutes to clinch and we won 9-0.  We definitely brought some extra intensity to the match to let out some latent frustration with our performance against Middlebury.

The NESCAC tournament starts up on Friday and we play our 1st round against Bates on Friday morning.  It was a tough weekend for the team, but we're looking forward to a focused week of practice and a great start to postseason play.

Until next week,
Jeremy