Thursday, April 1, 2010

Miscellany

Anastasia Rodionova will participate for the first time as an Australian during the Fed Cup playoff taking place later this month. Australia will play Ukraine in Kharkiv. Also on the Australian team are Sam Stosur, Alicia Molik and Rennae Stubbs. Rodionova was born in Russian and played for Russia for several years.

The Sony Ericsson WTA Tour and Sony Ericsson have launched SuperFans, a social media channel that aggregates the social media of all participating players. This is the first project of its kind in professional sports.

Serena Williams has asked organizers of the Italian Open to hold a wild card spot open for her. This year, the event will be played in a new 10,500-seat stadium.

Kim Clijsters has accepted a wild card into the tournament in Marbella.

Laura Robson says her suitcase is this big.

I miss Dinara. A lot.

4 comments:

Overhead Spin said...

I have to confess that I was never a big fan of Dinara, but I actually do miss her especially as it is coming up to her time of the year. I always marvelled at someone who had such poor movement on hard courts could move so well on clay.

Overhead Spin said...

Diane what are your thoughts on the superfan website? I love it actually. A one stop shop so that fans can keep up with their faves. However, it does show that not every player wants to be out there. It would be good if the younger and not so popular or well known players could ensure that they also have a twitter page or a facebook page so that fans can get to know them. Even though it is the WTA's job to market all players, the fact remains that players need to help in this regard as well. In addition, I hope that going forward the WTA really thinks about having its own network that is geared towards featuring women's tennis. The ATP did it sometime ago and it was wonderful for men's tennis. We have some really knowledgeable women in the game who would make excellent commentators on WTA tv

Anonymous said...

Just FYI on Dinara, she's only just gotten back on court this week. They're letting her practice 40 minutes a day, hoping to gradually increase, and at the first sign of her having any back pain, they'll stop it.
http://news.sport-express.ru/2010-03-31/353478/

She also had a decent interview with a Croatian paper, in case you'd like a bigger fix.
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fgloria.com.hr%2Fvijesti%2Fshowpage.php%3Fid%3D11011&sl=hr&tl=en

Diane said...

Karen, I'm not into social networking--at all--so I can take it or leave it. But given how many people like that sort of thing, it's probably a good idea. And I agree that a WTA network would be very nice.

Anon, thanks for the update and the article!