Reflecting on my first tournament

Well, my first tournament (Men's Doubles: 3.5 - 4.0) is done and even though I lost every game, I'm posting it in wins and accomplishments because this is the first step.

I won't pretend to say that I procrastinated on writing this post and debated just not updating since there was some embarrassment / shame in that I didn't come close to winning a single game, but this is part of the journey right?

As far as a quick reflection on what happened, here are some of my takeaways:=

Team synergy is critical in competitive settings.

I was playing with a friend visiting from LA, but this was only our third time playing together. While I think we will eventually work well, our partner synergy was clearly rough around the edges compared to the well oiled teams we played against.

Tournament jitters are a reality and something I'll have to learn to deal with.

While I love the idea of "rising to the occasion," my experience is that most of the time people "fall to the level of your standards." And this was tournament was no exception. All of our opponents were seasoned 3.8 - 4.0 tournament players (compared to my 3% reliability of 3.6 at the time and my partner's placeholder 3.5), and it clearly showed in the results.

Don't try new things in a tournament (if you want to perform your best).

There is this mantra in the running community about "not trying new things the day of the race." This ranges from what you eat to fuel up all the way down to every item of clothing. And the truth is I failed to heed that advice and had made some recent changes to my paddle setup (to minimize wrist strain cause I overweighted my paddle and test out a thinner handle) and was trying to implement strategies and techniques I had only recently learned from a coach. As you can imagine, this led to far more unforced errors and things just not flowing the way I expected.

That's about it at a high level. I'm happy to take any questions from people about the experience and welcome any feedback / counterpoints to some of my takeaways. Thanks for reading!