Player-Tournament Schedule Planning
Figuring out the optimal schedule of tournaments is very challenging for all players. For top players such as Roger Federer, his schedule has been planned the past couple years assuming that he will reach the finals of every tournament he plays. As a result, Federer has also planned several breaks of a few weeks in length throughout the season, e.g. after the Australian Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. In contrast, James Blake
is on a lengthy travel swing since the beginning of 2008. After a very brief off-season in December because the U.S. played and won the Davis Cup Finals in early December, Blake competed in Sydney, the Australian Open and then after losing in the quarters he flew to Austria to play in a first round Davis Cup match on red clay. Since then, Blake is now in the second week of three consecutive weeks of hard court tournaments in the U.S., i.e. Delray Beach, San Jose and Memphis. That is a long stretch of non-stop tournament tennis and it seems to be affecting Blake a bit physically and mentally. However, these scheduling choices are difficult for someone such as James Blake who garners most of his points from hard court tournaments. Therefore, although his play may suffer as a result of so many tournament weeks in a row, he also needs the points to maintain his ranking as the spring clay court season approaches. Novak Djokovic and Jelena Jankovic had breakthrough seasons in 2007, but they played a lot of tournaments and matches which seemed to affect their performance in the later part of the year after the U.S. Open. In the end, scheduling a year of tournaments can be tricky for players at all levels. One needs to consider how and where one can earn the most ranking points, how long one expects to last in events, as well as the travel required.
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