Serbia open - tennis tournament

This will be one little throwback article. It is Thursday, after all. Serbia open is a professional tennis tournament that is held in Belgrade. Currently, it is held in Novak Tennis Center. This year it was held it April, and it happened to start the weekend that my brother came to visit. On Sunday there were qualifications, and the tournament was starting from Monday. My first thought was that there are probably no tickets left. But it turned out that qualifications were open and free to watch, so we decided to go. 

Novak Tennis Center is downtown, in old part of the Belgrade, just on the river side. It is a nice spot, but this time it was not so great because it was cold and windy day, and like name says, you are in open space, sitting on the wind. But it was bad only in few moments.

As soon as we got it, I was surprised by the chill area. It really looked like that, a very chill and neat place. There are little stands with food as well there, so that you can grab some bite in between the matches. Since this was qualifications, matched were on smaller courts. I was a bit disappointed because we couldn't even get in to see big court. 

My brother chosen match that we will watch, and that was Nino against Yuri. The match was not so interesting, I have to say, because it was dominantly won by Yuri. We wanted to go to the other bit bigger field, but there was a line waiting to enter it. I didn't get why there is line and waiting when I saw many free spaces, but later I realized that they waited in between gems, so that they don't make too much noise and deconsecrate players. We didn't want to wait and got back to first field to watch another match. This one was far more interesting and close in the result.

It was the first time for me to watch tennis live, but what caught my attention the most, were tennis ball catches. There were groups of younger and older children, with two leaders. They were very fun to watch and so cute. Also, I realized how much job there is in one tennis match: changing line judges, changing catches, changing balls, grooming the field,... Of course, I watched a tennis match before, but this was not something I paid attention to.

Overall, it was nice experience and maybe next year we go to some bigger matches.

All photos I used in this article (including lead image) are original and taken by me.

Thank you for reading my post 💖