Cici has been training with us as a full-time player since October and it is truly great to see how much her game has changed so far. When she started her trainings with us, we decided to keep on adding small changes to her technique, giving her time to adjust and find her own game. Day in day out she has been putting in consistent effort and now her hard work starts to show both in her development as a player and her results. 

Since the start of this year, she has reached numerous times quarter-finals of Monty tournaments and yesterday she won her first tournament here in Spain, beating her opponent 7-6 2-6 10-5 in the final. 

Our director Raphael points out that "Cici is a great example of how hard work and patience pay off. She had to work on technical changes for a few months and was uncomfortable, but now she is getting the results of that patience and perseverance".

Cici, when looking back at her time at our academy and her progress so far, emphasised technique and her mental approach:

"I think since the autumn my game has improved a lot technically, my groundstrokes, volleys and serve needed a lot of technical changes and mainly my backhand, for the entire first month of being here I worked on my backhand every day for almost all of the day & my game has improved a lot mentally as well because before I joined BTA, I hadn’t competed in a while so with the more matches I played, I gained more confidence to trust in my shots and my game as a whole."

We want all our players to be focused on the process and be very aware of short-term goals and long-term objectives. It is very important that they set goals on a regular basis:

"Now I am working on hitting my shots with intention and finding and maintaining a constant rhythm during my matches which will enable me to have more confidence in my game."

As regards the long-term future, Cici has a very clear vision as well:

"My goals for the future are to carry on improving, specifically in perfecting my game style (big serve and looking to move forward on the next shot) and to compete in higher level tournaments".

Many congratulations to Cici! The whole BTA team is very proud of her. Let's keep on improving!