Welcome to 2014 tennis

There may still be several more days of 2013, but for tennis fans the new year has already begun.  You see, tennis is starting!!!!  Earlier today I had the first match of the Hopman Cup on a live stream on my computer.  Now I have a replay of one of the Abu Dhabi matches on my TV.  Even though these are just exhibitions, it is still a sign that the new season is beginning.

But much more important than either of these is that Roger Federer has now arrived in Brisbane Australia to get his first tournament of the season underway.  You could tell his arrival was met with much excitement when they set up a spot for a press conference right in the airport at 7:00 a.m.  Being the accommodating fellow that he is, he went along with it.

There really has been quite a lot of excitement going on in the Federer camp in the past week or so.  It started with the news that he was starting a management agency for athletes called Team8 with his manager Tony Godsick, having already signed Del Potro and Dimitrov.  The news got much more exciting, however, when he announced on Christmas Eve that his twins Myla and Charlene were going to be big sisters to a new little Fed baby, due sometime in 2014.  That certainly set the Twitter world on fire!  The latest news is that Stefan Edberg, who spent a week with him in Dubai in the off season, is going to be working with him as a coach starting at the Aussie Open for at least 10 weeks during the upcoming year.

That feels like a lot of momentum to start the year, coming off of a season in which he struggled with injury, leading to a lack of effective practice and a lack of confidence, managing to only win one title the whole year.  He is highly motivated coming into 2014, however, and if he can stay healthy I believe he is going to have a much better year, hopefully resulting in many titles, maybe even another grand slam to add to his incredible 17.  It would be a great way to start the year to win in Brisbane, being he is the top seed and he should be able to beat every person in the draw.  So Federer fans will be holding their collective breath waiting to see what the next month will bring from our hero.