31 days later … #Ringtennis #worldCup

It’s been one month since the 2014 Ringtennis World Cup in South Africa now and I really needed those four weeks to digest all the experiences—the ones with the national team but also rather personal ones. However, before writing about the world cup in one or two separate posts, I’m gonna talk about the open tournament I played in Siegen last weekend.

First of all, it was really, really good to see most of my teammates from the national team again! After the world cup ended and we returned to Germany, everything went very quick. You say goodbye to everyone and then suddenly you’re not together with the people you’ve spent two incredible and intensive weeks with anymore. That’s actually pretty tough! So it was really cool to meet for a less serious competition and a nice party to look back on and reappraise the time we’ve spent in South Africa. But let’s get on to the tournament …

I played the mixed doubles together with world singles champion Vera Vollhase. Although we only came in 4th place and our performance was not that glorious, we played a very interesting semifinal against Tatjana Schutte and Sebastian Weber. In fact, I had never before played a match with a half-time standing of 0–0! In words: zero to zero! At half-time! The match itself was not too defensive (at least from our side), but obviously, catching everything and making no mistakes is already half the battle. This was of course incedibly uninteresting for the audience. Yet, although it might not look like that, a match of this kind is very, very exhausting because if you have just a momentary lapse of concentration, you lose. In the end, we lost 3–5 and all of our opponents’ points were unforced errors, which unfortunately proved their tactic right.

In the men’s singles competition, I won all of my group stage matches by far—including the one against national team member Michael Kaiser (who came in 3rd place in the end). This meant that in the semifinal I had to play Julian Sauck, another fellow teammate who came in 3rd place at the German singles championships last year. I won this match by almost 20 points to meet 2010 German singles champion Alexej Ermak in the final. It was a close and tough match, but finally I managed to secure a 29–22 victory. This was actually the first time I won him since 2011 and I consider my performance in the tournament to be my best since 2009. Alexej and me then went on to win the men’s doubles competition in a very unchallenged manner.

To conclude, returning from the Siegen tournament having won two competitions was really, really cool because it was the very first Ringtennis tournament I played (back in 1999) but until now, I could never manage to win it 🙂