By Neto Baptiste
Antigua and Barbuda’s lone professional tennis player, Jody Maginley, is happy with his doubles game as he anticipates that his doubles ranking will move from its current number at 675 to around 540, just 31 points shy of his career-high ranking of 509.
This following his latest triumph in International Tennis Federation (ITF) doubles competition where, along with Canadian doubles partner, Juan Carlos Aguilar, they easily dispatched the Spain pair of Jorge Plans and Bruno Navarro to win the final of the M25 Madrid Tennis Championships held in Spain from September 11-17 by 6-4, 6-3 margins.
“I am still focused on singles a little bit, but I realise that recently, with my doubles success, it’s a good opportunity for me to really focus on doubles, so I’ve trained specifically for doubles pretty much for the last four weeks where I had a one or two weeks training block and then I came to Europe to play this tournament, so it’s nice that the work I am putting in on the doubles court is finally paying off,” he said.
The winning pair had earlier gotten past Spain’s Naim Fernandez and Sergio Hernando 6-3, 7-5 in quarterfinals before going on to beat John Echeverria and Ricardo Villacorta, both of Spain 6-1, 6-3.
Maginley said there is now a better understanding between Aguilar and himself as they continue to play more matches together.
“It was a good week for me, and it’s my first $25k title. I’ve made a couple of finals in the past so I am happy to get over the line, and it’s my second win of the summer which is nice. I think this week we were the second seed so we had a little bit of a good draw at the beginning. The first matches were very clinical and we were very disciplined with our tactics and mentality. It’s my third week in a row with this partner and it just took a few weeks to click and to learn each other in terms of how we play and how we benefit each other, so I was happy for it to come together this week, and now I will be in a position where my ranking is very close to my career high with a few months left in the year,” the player said.
The doubles result was the second major win for Maginley in that category following victory in an ITF M15 professional tournament held in Pittsburgh, USA in July. The Antiguan had teamed up with Barbados’ Darian King to take that title.