As the final match of my Kampen coverage, I chose the German duel between Linda Fritschke, who showed impressing tennis in the qualies and Carolin Neumann. Neumann seemed to be slightly better in their strokes and especially in their moves, but she was mentally too weak and showed several unforced errors or double faults in the deciding moment. You could really see the pressure under which Neumann seemed to be. After Linda won the first set 6:2 absolutely deserved, I left Kampen.

Of course, at the end of a sports event trip like that it is always time to reflect about the tournament and about all the impressions I got there (these words do not express my feelings about this match, but of all matches I saw, please don't mix it up). First of all, I was very impressed about the high level a large couple of players showed in the Kampen days. Nevertheless, I am leaving Kampen with some very mixed emotions. The huge amount of pressure these kids had to face in Kampen really made me angry. I am not talking about the pressure they put on themselve as they want to win, but on the pressure some players were put on by their families and coaches. I saw several players who really mentally collapsed on court. These kids should compete in a tournament to gain experience, face different opponents from different countries including that they learn different ways to play tennis, that they learn how to beat an opponent who might have some dangerous strengths and so on. I think it is not important whether they win or loose there, as long as they play their best and play fair. Maybe the greatest thing about winning a match there is that they will have another match in which they gain more experience the following day. Apart from that, winning or loosing should be mostly unimportant I think. Instead of support their kids in that way, some parents (of course, not all!) look like they want to decorate themselves with the victories of their kids - and do not recognize how much they harm them with that. It really made me angry how important ETA ranking points are for some of the kids at that age.
The conditions to report from Kampen differed heavily between crap and great. I think, that some tournament officials did not recognize the great chance with the sport-live.net / tennis-foto.de / tennisindia.org coverage from an event like this will be for their tournament. I have to say that some of them sometimes even behaved ridiculous to me. Bad luck that I was not able to go to Meppel, where the tournament director seemed to be a very clever and friendly guy - I am sure that the kids will have much fun there next week! Hopefully, skipping Meppel due to my job interview will be the right decision at the end.