Tennis

All of you who know me know that tennis is my favorite sport. I love everything about it. I love to watch it, I love to play it, I love to play it on xbox. I even love the smell of tennis balls when you first open a new can. I play it two or three times a week and for the past two weeks I have been in a slump. It seemed like no matter what I was doing it just wasn't good enough. My serve was off. My backhand is always a little off but it seemed like I could barely return the ball. And then yesterday my forehand began to suck. I was beginning to give up. My forehand is the one tool that I have in my tennis game that I thought I could always rely on and it was failing. So tonight I played with my roomate Wes. He is really really good at tennis. I have played him a lot and have lost to him everytime. I am beginning to wonder if the fun of beating me has worn off. But anyways we played the first set and my bad luck was continuing. He beat me 6-0. Now even though I have never beat Wes I rarely lose that badly, normally it is 6-3 or 6-4. So It seemed like that was the way it was going to be again in the second set. He one the first two games to take an early lead. Then it was my serve and I do not know what happened but I found my serve again. I was able to hit hard and with some decent placement. I won that game. Then I broke his serve. Then I won serve again. Then we rotated winning our own serves until it was 3-4 Wes with me serving. He took the first point due to a lousy second serve. Then I took the next three points. I was up 40-15 with two opportunities to take the game to tie it up. I was finally in the zone playing tennis and concentrating on the game. Until I went up for that serve. I tossed the ball in the air and let my mind wander to my badly parked car out on the street wondering if I was going to get a ticket for my inability to parralell park. Served it into the net. So I went up for a second serve with the same worry and boom hit it into the net again. I repeated this again making it tied at 40-40. I had blown my lead, my chance to tie the score and have a chance at winning the set. Dissappointed with myself for letting myself get so easily distracted I had a hard time getting myself back into the game. Wes broke my serve and took the next two games to close out the set 6-3.

So we came home and I have given some heavy consideration on what happened to make me lose concentration and I have finally figured it out. I let my mind wander away from what was really important. I tossed the ball up to serve and didn't concentrate on how hard I was going to hit it or where I was going to hit it to. Instead I focused on something entirely different and unimportant. The result was a horrible mishit that had a ripple effect on the rest of my game. It seemed like I couldn't get my mind back on what it was I needed to do. As I have been thinking about it I have realized that it is a great metaphor for my life as well. It seems like sometimes things are going great and I am getting things accomplished when all of a sudden I let something distract me from what is really important and then I have a heck of a time getting back on track. So the goal for me is to not allow that to happen. If I could have kept focused on the game of tennis I possibly could of had a chance to finally beat Wes. If I keep my eyes on what it really important in life then I will have a much better chance of succeeding. I know it is such a simple and easy concept but it is one I definately need to do much better at. Who would have thought a stupid tennis match would have taught me so much about myself?