Head Coach Sandy Wood

July 18, 2008

I hope you are all having a great summer. In Rhode Island the weather has been mostly hot and sunny. It's been a good time for tennis, sailing, fishing and even an occasional foray out to the links. The team is working hard playing a lot and working on their fitness. Our strength coach provided the ladies with a comprehensive plan for the summer to prepare them for the season. We have been very fortunate to have few injuries over the four years that I've been coaching and I suspect that is a result of our strength training, a reasonable amount of play and some luck.

I will be writing a season preview email soon but for now suffice it to say that with 5 experienced returnees and 3 strong freshmen arriving at the end of August, this will be one of the strongest teams in URI history. I'm still setting up a schedule that will be challenging and also reasonable in terms of travel so that the ladies will have time to excel in academics as well as tennis. It takes a lot of advance planning on their part but this group does an excellent job of balancing high level Division 1 Tennis with strong academics. In fact, I am proud to say that for the second consecutive semester Women's Tennis leads the 22 URI sports with the highest GPA while establishing ourselves as one of the top Eastern teams and finishing in the top half of the very tough Atlantic 10 conference. We are a balanced team with excellence in many areas.

This week, I had the rare privilege of playing tennis with the Legends on the grass courts at the Newport Hall of Fame. It was a morning of playing with greats such as Stan Smith, Todd Martin (he can still bring it!), Martina Hingis (my favorite women's player), Tom Gullickson (nasty lefty serve), Richie Renenberg and Jonathan Stark (I think they won Wimbledon in doubles), Corina Mariou (Wimbledon doubles champ) and more. Their skills were amazing. I particularly noticed how well they all volleyed. Essentially you rotate through different courts for 3 hours getting to play and chat it up with all of them. It was a great experience.

I did make one mistake though. At one point, I was playing with Stan Smith against Todd Martin and his partner. I was feeling pretty good to be back on grass and consequently with Stan serving to the ad court I was looking to volley when possible. Todd hit a solid shot up the middle which I stepped in front of and cut off through the gap. I have a tendency when I get a little nervous to sort of giggle which is what I did after basically hitting the perfect untouchable poach off TODD MARTIN. Well two points later when he received serve again, he decided to teach me a lesson and ripped his two handed BH up the line right at me. I was keyed up and somehow made a reflex volley right through the gap again at which time I nervously giggled again. Todd (who is a great guy) somewhat jokingly said "Sandy, I don't mind if you hit winners against me but you have to stop laughing after each one." At that point, Stan stirred the pot by saying "Hey Todd, Sandy just told me he thinks you're a Joke!" (Which I obviously did not say.) Todd now pretends to be mad. On the next point with Stan serves to Todd's partner while Todd and I are at net. Stan purposely takes the first volley and sets it up for Todd to hit an easy overhead from inside the service line. Todd basically pounds it at about 150 mph about 4 feet to the side of me while I'm at net. He then asks "Do you think that's Funny too!" I'm giggling uncontrollably by this time. As you can tell, it was a wonderful opportunity to play with some of the greatest players in history who all turned out to be really fun and super nice people.

I hope you are all playing a lot and that you come out and watch our matches this fall. Feel free to contact me any time to talk tennis.

Sincerely,

Sandy Wood
URI Women's Tennis Coach
401-423-0456
abwood@cox.net