Melbourne Coaches Conference

Melbourne – Coaches conference!

I have so much to talk about this time. Time flies in Melbourne and I am enjoying every minute. So far I didn’t find the time to update the blog. If I want to tell everything it will take ages to write it… so I will try to keep things short.

I arrived on Wednesday the 12^th of January. The first week I stayed in Port Melbourne, close to the beach and 30 min away from the city center by tram. After dropping my luggage in Port Melbourne, I went to the city center and I went to the information centre where I took 1 kilo of information brochures J When I left the information centre it started raining so I jumped on the city circle tram which is free and goes around the city. It was one of the old trams and I enjoyed the sightseeing. After the tram, I walked bit in the Melbourne streets and did some shopping.

Thursday was the first day of the Grand Slam Australian Coaches Conference. There were about 250 tennis coaches and the conference venue was the Hisense Arena (the second biggest arena after the Rod laver for the Australian Open). Craig Tiley, the tournament director did the welcome word. He was very worried about the rain because the qualifies had to be played. 

There were some great presentations! The best presentations were from Paul Annacone (Now the coach of Roger Federer and previous coach of Pete Sampras and Tim Henman) and Gill Rayes (physical coach Andre Agassi). These coaches have so much experience and were good public speakers. 

There were also some on-court sessions about FH en BH drills and tricks to correct mistakes. There was also an on-court session about cardio tennis, a new trend from America. This was very interesting! It is a type of tennis and fitness training in one. Ken De Hart, from America gave some good presentations about tennis drills and unusual dubbel positions. This was very funny. He presented some surprising ways for players to play dubbel. We also saw a training session in the Hisense Arena of Andy Roddick. 

There were many many other presentations which were very interesting!

I have spoken to a lot of coaches and it was very interesting to see how tennis is organised in Australia! In Australia the newest trend are the Hot Shots, this is the "minitennis or Kidstennis" from Belgium. In Australia it is very new to use softer and bigger balls and smaller rackets an play tennis on smaller courts... 

On the other hand, Australia has some very good programs for elite tennis... 

I also went to see some tennis on the smaller courts with the ground pass which was included in the conference.

Here some pictures of my first days in Melbourne and the conference:

After training Xavier Malisse

The Australian Open is Everywhere in the city

Federation Square

Cardio Tennis on court presentation

Paul Annacone

Training Murray