After completing both regional NCTTA and ACUI tournaments to qualify for collegiate nationals and just surfacing after a busy midterm week, I think looking back over the past month is a refreshing exercise.
Through some unfortunate scheduling, our NCTTA regionals (for teams qualification) was planned to be on the same day as the ACUI tournament (for singles qualification). The result was having both tournaments in a row, which although took a huge chunk of time out of the weekend in fact helped me improve my game quite a bit. Its been the first time in a while that I’ve gotten to play many matches for consecutive days, and it reminded me how much fun it is to keep competing. In the end, I was able to qualify for singles and team Princeton qualified first from our region after posting solid wins over other contenders Penn State and UMCP.
On a slightly more technical level, I’ve realized that simply practicing game-style points at the end of training sessions is not enough, and that playing matches relatively frequently helps to maintain level. While this is not strictly necessary for players who play several times a week, for those of us who cannot do so it is a good idea to try to get a match or two in every session. This semester I’ve been getting most of our team members to come to multiple practices a week, and we usually finish up 1 session with a 5 person round robin. Also, the team atmosphere is definitely a lot of fun.