Friday, October 3, 2025

2:26 p.m.

I'm happy to finish fourth place in the main draw. I lost in the second round, which was the quarter final, and then I won a couple matches in the back draw, and I lost my last one, which was the bronze medal match against Jess Warren. She played really, really well, so I can't even be upset with myself. She didn't make any errors, and she was super consistent. So I'm happy with the result to finish fourth.

I'll get ready for tomorrow and Sunday. I'll play a couple of rec games here and there with my split-age partner and my doubles partner, and after that, I'm probably gonna head back to the hotel, try to order some food, probably do more work, as I do have a full time job and I have to make up for my time that I was at the court.

For my full-time job, I work at a consulting firm as an actuary. So day-to-day, it looks like around six to nine hours of work. I'll try to fit pickleball within that schedule, it's pretty flexible, which allows me to travel for tournaments, and I'm super grateful for that. Otherwise, if I had to go to the office or travel more for work, I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing. And it just lets me work from pretty much anywhere in the country. So that's really, really big help.

I'm overall happy with how it went today.

10:36 a.m.

Just finished my first round. As I thought it was going to be, it was a very hard match. I saved a couple of match points, and I finished 18-16 in the third set so it was definitely a battle, and a mental battle too. Playing your close friend is always really hard. You can't really show your emotions too much, because you don't want to get into it too much like you would with other players. So just important to stay calm and not go to your highs, but also not hit the lows, so keep the energy going. It was definitely very streaky, like singles could be. It was not the most fun, but hopefully the next rounds will be slightly better and more loose. I'll have to clean up some errors if I want to keep going today, but happy to get the win!

8:50 a.m.

Hey everyone! Day one, super excited to be here in Columbus. I have to play my really, really good friend, Maria Tatarnikova, first round of singles, so we'll see how it goes. We actually warmed up together yesterday and we warmed up this morning. We used to play college tennis on one team together, so hopefully this will be fun.

I'm looking forward to all the matches and exciting partners this week. I played this event last year, and I think the APP did an even better job this year. Championship Court looks even nicer, the bleachers are nicer, and we actually got a couple extra courts indoors, and I heard we'll be playing indoors all day today. I'm actually excited for that so we don't have to go back and forth, indoor and outdoor, between our matches. So it's good to have the indoor venue, so we'll see how it goes.