Another busy month which started on the lawns of Wimbledon and Emily’s first foray into the prestigious Junior grass-court Grand Slam. In the singles, Emily drew the Italian, Pieri – an evenly balanced match in terms of rankings. The match started well with Emily playing some good, powerful tennis. However, the tenacious Italian showed no fear and made very few errors, which made it hard for Emily to stamp her mark on the match. A disappointing loss followed which Emily felt very hard but a good experience nevertheless and lots of useful lessons were learned by all of Team Apple
It was a similar fate in the doubles, where Emily and her US partner, Morgan Coppoc, faced Fourlis and Lin from Australia. Again, a good display of tennis but not enough to secure the win so we look ahead to next year when Emily with having the benefit of her experience this year to draw upon and will be looking to get much deeper into the competition.
From the lawns of SW19, Emily quickly moved back to the red clay in preparation for the European Championships in Klosters, Switzerland only one week later. To assist with this preparation, Emily entered and won a Ladies Open event in Toulon, France – getting revenge on Margot Sturchler to whom she had lost in a similar event three years ago.
The European Championships quickly followed and started well with Emily getting revenge once more, this time over Nika Kozar of Slovenia who had knocked her out of a G4 tournament in Croatia. This set her up with a match against Markovic of Serbia which Emily won comfortably 2 and 0, so giving her a place in the last 16 and a match against the number 3 seed, Anshba from Russia, currently ranked 6 in the World.
Emily started the match strongly and led for much of the first set but Ansbha then found her rhythm and started to dominate the match, forcing Emily to make errors. The experience of the Russian shone through but Emily played a good match and it was encouraging to see how well she handled the competition. Ansbha went on to win the Singles Title putting out both the number 1 and 2 seeds along the way.
In the doubles, Emily teamed up with fellow Brit, Jodie Burrage, and they managed to reach the Semi-Finals, losing eventually to Pieri (yes, her again) and Bilardo of Italy 6/4 6/4.
From Klosters, Emily headed to Italy to represent Team GB in the qualifying competition of the U18 Summer Cup. In the first round, GB faced Greece and the team, comprising Emily, Eden Richardson and Georgie Axon, secured wins in all their matches to set them up with a semi-final against Moldova. Unfortunately, despite two very valiant efforts GB narrowly lost both of the singles matches in the semi-final – both matches were three sets and both lasted close on three hours – and this meant that Moldova went through to the final and Team GB had to play Portugal for third place (which they secured comfortably).
August sees the end of the clay court season (after two ITF Pro events) and a transition onto hard court in preparation for the Canadian and US Opens. No summer break on the Junior Tennis Tour!
