Kolos represents Luxembourg in tennis

Year 6 student Kolos was selected to represent Luxembourg in an international tennis tournament against 27 other countries. Read about his exciting experiences below.

I was selected to play for Luxembourg in the International Tennis Federation's 12 and Under Winter Cup in Bayeux, France. I prepared for the tournament by having a couple of extra trainings with the tennis federation along with my regular trainings. My preparation was not great since in December and the start of January I did not feel well. Even a few days before the competition I was sick.

The journey to the event was quite an adventure since it was a 7.5-hour drive to Bayeux. It was a long trip, but we had fun chatting and playing video games. When we got to the site, we had some time to spare, so we did some physical training before going onto the court for practice. On this day we did not play any matches, we just practised for 1-2 hours then we went to the hotel to rest.

When I first got the news that I was selected to represent Luxembourg in the Winter Cup, I was really delighted. However, when we got to the site, I started to feel nervous. It was not a good feeling. It was pretty hard adjusting since there were no people I knew at the start of the tournament – it was just the group of me, my teammates and the coach. But after a while, I became friends with the Hungarian team.

My first impressions were that when I saw the children on the other teams, I was a little bit surprised because from the French team one boy was as tall as his coach and also in the Portuguese team the boys were massive compared to us. My teammates and I joked that our small country has only small people (like me).

The daily life there was to wake up at 7am. Then you had breakfast with your team which was made up of eggs, ham, bread, cereal and milk. I was a little bit surprised that there were no fruits. Around 8am we headed to the venue to warm up. The tennis club was a 10-minute drive from the hotel. We had the first singles match at 11am. When it finished we had lunch then we played the rest of the matches, another singles and a doubles. Around 6pm we went back to the hotel and stayed there for like 30 minutes to change and shower. Then we went to a nearby restaurant for dinner. We went to bed around 8pm.

The first day we were playing against the Netherlands. I didn’t play singles. I only played the doubles that we lost after a tough fight 6:4 7:6. On the next day, we played against Hungary; I played only singles and I lost 6:1 6:1. My teammate also lost his singles and we lost the doubles, too. That day everybody was really sad from my team, my teammates were even crying. This result meant we came seventh in the tournament.

We did not really explore new places since there was no time. We were always on the court, playing or encouraging our teammates.

We became good friends with the Hungarian team. In the evenings we played a silly game with them in the hotel: we would knock on their door then quickly run away and they did the same to us.

Adjusting to the food was very hard and challenging because at home I eat different food to what there was, like sweet bread. Also, in the club, the lunch was terrible. It was frozen and you had to put the food in the microwave to heat it up. Unluckily when I was preparing my food the microwave stopped working, so I had to wait 10 minutes to get another one.

I think it was a really good experience this tournament in France because there were a lot of people who were better than us and this was a really good opportunity for us to see how the top tennis players in Europe play. My future goal is to play on a European level and go to large European tournaments from which I can progress to a higher level. So, I need to keep doing my best in training and have consistent shots.