Some firsts in life you remember: your first time driving a car, your first homerun, and your first time skydiving. Here's a new first for me that I hope to forget. I've been professionally coaching tennis since 2008 and coaching baseball since 1997. I've never cancelled a practice due to unhealthy air quality. Play indoors instead tonight. Right now, the smokey mass of air moving from Canada to our area really has us looking hazy in the Upper Cumberland, It looks rough up here in Cookeville. After parents sent me messages questioning breathing safety, I did some looking into the air quality on a couple different websites and here's the screenshots I took between Cookeville, Sparta, and McMinnville, where our tennis students play. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wildfire-smoke-maps-canadian-latest-air-quality-forecasts/
Needless to say, that quote from Accuweather for our area got my attention, "Healthy individuals may experience difficulty breathing and throat irritation with prolonged exposure. Limit outdoor activity."
With rain coming in this afternoon and the air quality rated at unhealthy, let's stay off the courts tonight, because we will definitely be prolonging exposure by breathing hard for 1.5 hours. The air quality looks like it will fix itself by our Saturday morning matches in McMinnville on Saturday. Enjoy a little bit more of the two-week dead period. In the meantime, watch this video on recovery positions as reinforcement to what you've learned in the first week of JTT together (or maybe it is new to you!). I'm a big fan of Essential Tennis and Ian Westermann for beginner and intermediate groups for the quality of his videos and explanations.
You'll get more info tomorrow on our Saturday plans and upcoming JTT State Championship on July 21-23!
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