Mental health, confidence and living pain free: Nadia Podoroska’s plan to ‘start from scratch’

Restart. This is the challenge he has been facing for several months Nadia Podoroska. The tennis player from Rosario had a dream season in 2020, in which she reached the semifinals of Roland Garros and was awarded WTA Newcomer of the Year. And last year it reached the 36th step of the ranking, its best position. But in his prime, an injury that he had trouble identifying at first caused him a lot of heartache.

A proximal tendinopathy of the hamstring of the right leg halted its ascent and forced her to take a long break from the circuit: she did not play from August 2021 until June 2022. That long inactivity has left her facing a scenario similar to the one she had faced in her first years as a professional and of faced with the need a start from the bottom.

“It’s like starting from scratch. With a lot of experience in my backpack and more maturity than when I started playing, but doing exactly the same process and work as when I was 20 and 200th in the world, almost like I am now,” he summed up the small195th in the standings, at the beginning of a chat with clarion in a corner of the Buenos Aires Lawn Tennis.

-Is your experience and knowing that you have tennis and the ability to be among the best in the world something positive at this stage or does it make you want to get there faster and generate anxiety?

– A little bit of both. As soon as I competed again, I was playing at my highest level in months and felt a lot of anxiety to be back, to come back. Today I feel it too, because already knowing the path and having had that experience, one wants to rest in it. But the reality is that it is a total uncertainty, because having arrived once, having touched that ranking, guarantees absolutely nothing. So I try to take it as an experience I’ve had, which has done me a lot of good and which shows me that I’m capable of doing it, something you never know when you’re a girl and you’re starting. But at the same time I know I have to break my back again.

-Did it cost you to manage that desire to want to move faster than you could?

-It was hard. I talked a lot about it with my former team, which I separated from in early November, and I’m working on it with mine mind trainer. It’s a process I’m going through. Sometimes I see it more clearly, sometimes I don’t… I’m somewhere in between. Confidence and mental health are essential in tennis, because we expose ourselves to quite difficult situations. That’s why I always like to have a great support team, to feel free when it comes to expressing my feelings. When I was little, it was very difficult for me to say what I felt, what I thought. I think what I’ve matured the most has been in that aspect: being able to trust the outside, the team, and express what happens to me without fear of being judged.

Podoroska closed her 2022 at the Argentina Open, tournament in the WTA 125 category (equivalent to challengers masculine), which marked a new stage in his journey of “return to being”. A path that he had begun to follow in June, when he lost in the second round of the standings Wimbledonthe first official tournament he played after ten months of inactivity.

Since then, he has alternated tournaments in the ITF World Tour (he made it to the finals in one in Gran Canaria, Spain in August), the WTA 125 series and the circuit WTAin which his best result was the semifinal in the 250 of Chennai, in the month of September. He had many ups and downs and he was aware of it, but he didn’t get discouraged.

“Today I feel very far from that Nadia of Roland Garros 2020. The last few months of this year have been very tough, my level is completely different and I’m aware of it. One of the biggest challenges I have is somehow forgetting everything I went through two years ago and focus on building again, little by little,” acknowledged who has been living in Alicante for four years.

And he added: “I don’t know if I will be able to return to that level. This is the reality. I can assure you that I will do the work and I will have that predisposition. I am going to continue training and competing. I will try, because tennis continues to be my priority number one. I’ve had a good career, but I still have many years to learn and I want much more.”

The future

The lengthy layoff caused Podoroska to drop sharply in the standings. From that 36th place reached on July 12, 2021, he fell to 298th, which he occupied on September 12, just before reaching the semi-final in Chennai.

His time in Buenos Aires where he batted solana sierra, one of the promises of Argentine tennis, has allowed her to return to the top 200. Today she is 195th. The small He still doesn’t pay attention to those ups and downs in the charts.

“If you always look at the standings, it’s very exhausting. Like having constant pressure. I try to focus on my day, on my job, on the level I’m at. And I know that this will come by itself, “he assured.

With the physical problem completely resolved, apart from the fact that he continues to do special exercises to strengthen the affected tendon, he has concentrated on recovering the rhythm of the race and, above all, his confidence.

“Since I’ve come back, my body is responding very well. I’m realizing my goal, which was to stay healthy and not have to stop again. Now I want to improve my tennis level, which has been fluctuating in recent months , as reflected in the results,” he explained.

And he analysed: “I feel that I lack a lot more aggression. I have a lot of doubts on the pitch and I’m not doing so much damage. But in training I’m behaving. That’s why I think it’s basically confidence. Being able to compete, face a match and win it , repeating it and believing more and more in myself, is what I need most right now”.

A 2023 with questions

At the end of 2022, Podoroska experienced a situation unknown to her. In early November she announced that she would no longer work with her coaches. Juan Pablo Guzman Y Emiliano Redondi and has since trained and competed without a coaching staff. This, added to that rebuilding process, has left it facing a rare scenario for 2023.

“The separation from my former team was part of this need to start over. With them I achieved many things, I grew a lot as a tennis player, but I needed to forget the Nadia I was at a certain point and be able to start again from zero, with new ideas. We had several weeks of in-depth talks to try to get a change in me. We were able to talk about it and we preferred to open professional paths. Personally, everything went very well with them,” said Rosario, who left on Saturday for Oceania.

In that continent, the season will start in united cup, a new coed country tournament to be played in three Australian cities. Will share the Argentina team with Lourdes Charles, Paola Ormechea, Francis Cerundolo, Frederick Coria Y Thomas Etcheverry. the debut sky blue -without Rosario on the pitch- he will face France from 7 this Thursday (Argentina time) in Perth (Brisbane and Sydney with the other venues). Then he will play Australian Openfor which you will benefit from the protected classification.

“Keeping healthy is the most important thing. After that, keep building my tennis and my confidence. These months have been very mental for me. I think the difference in my level hasn’t been so much in tennis but in mentality and emotional, because I want to face it every day, every week, with the same attitude as always, working and trying to improve”.

SA