After a disappointing season opener in Shanghai, beach volleyball pro Clemens Doppler and his partner Matthias Mellitzer are on the road again. Despite a dodgy start to their year, the Austrian tells us the duo's self confidence is still huge ahead of the next stop on the World Tour in the Czech Republic.
Hi guys,
Matthias and I spent the past 10 days in Vienna where we trained intensively and tried to overcome the jetlag after our long flight home from Shanghai. The tournament there didn’t end as we would have hoped, as we lost both of our preliminary matches and finished in 25th place. But that's history now. We've worked on a few things and I´m convinced we've finally found our game.
Right now we are already at the next tournament in Prague, where the competition is packed with world elite teams, and finally there's some good news for us - we will definitely play in the main tournament, which is a huge boost. Last year we had to fight through three qualification rounds and that used up much of our energy.
Our main goal for the tournament in Prague is to improve our ranking in the seeding list. At the moment, we are ranked somewhere around 25th place, which means that we always get quite strong opponents in the first two rounds of the main round. This is something we want to avoid in the future.
Now it is extremely important to transform our self confidence into the game to get things going. I think we proved during the second half of the last season, that everything is possible for us. We can hurt every other team on the world tour with our game, which means that we can also beat them all. But for that, Matthias and I will have to pull together. Losing a few games is not a big thing, as long as you play well.
After the tournament in Prague, we will rest for a week, then we will continue our training to get in shape for the big season highlights such as the Grand Slam in Beijing and the World Championships in Rome.
I will keep you updated,
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