Duke Women's Tennis Update

Dear Royal Blue Members and Tennis Supporters,

I wanted to thank you for all the support you have given both teams at the start of our seasons and of course wanted to thank you in advance for the rest of the year. I thought it would be nice to give you a quick update as to how our team was doing and some different things we have been working on. After our Northwestern and Indiana matches last week we felt we really needed to do a better job with our doubles and have been working hard all week. We have tried to emphasize to our girls that doubles is a lot about attitude and if you walk on the court believing you are going to win your match that is 90 percent of the battle.

There is a huge difference between saying “ I could win” vs “I should win” and we are working to instill that mindset into our team. You may seem some new doubles combinations in our next few matches, our goal as a team is to find the combinations that give us the best chance of winning the doubles point, not just trying to find one great team. In singles both Marc and I feel like we are getting better every time we go on the court. We having been working on being more disciplined and trying to have our team understand the differences in the types of errors they are making. We have been talking a lot about physical errors vs mental errors and in that of course trying to eliminate the mental errors. Everyone in the world makes physical errors on the tennis court (missing a forehand for example) what we want our team to look at is where they missed that forehand and was it because they made a bad decision on where to hit it. Hopefully this weekend and over the course of the next few weeks you will see a highly energized, disciplined team!!

On a personal note I want to add how much we love working with this group of girls. They put a lot into making all of us in the Duke tennis family proud and I hope when you walk away from a match you recognize that. We always talk about giving our fans an exciting product to watch and I think this group is getting better at that every time we walk on the court. Thank you for being such great supporters of both the men’s and women’s tennis teams here at Duke and hopefully we see you out at our matches.

All the Best,

Jamie Ashworth

Duke Women’s Tennis