This year’s Stockholm Open returned to its regular week in October. It was good to be back at the Royal Tennis Hall during the usual time, it gives us more time to enjoy daylight and slightly warmer days. We were also back into full action with no restrictions on the number of guests and a fully staffed team. Little did we know what that would mean and how lucky we were to have a regular-sized team again. 

The closer we got to the tournament week, the more news we got on players that were actually going to visit the tournament. It was a bit disappointing to see that Alex Zverev was still recovering from his injury and wouldn’t join, as it was announced, but it was thrilling to welcome back the 2018 winner, Stefanos Tsitsipas. The same for the 2019 winner, Denis Shapovalov, and all of the other amazing players that chose to participate in this year’s tournament. All in all, the names that made it to the main draw were big, and the excitement grew with each day. On the doubles side, my favourite part of the tournament, we were visited, among the 16 pairs that made it to the main draw, by two teams (Arévalo/Rojer and Glasspool/Heliovaara) that have qualified to the ATP World Tour Finals, where the best 8 singles players and the best 8 teams in the world compete for the last trophies of the season.

The highlights of the week for me were watching a few doubles matches here and there (Arévalo/Rojer vs Kubot/Oswald and Arévalo/Rojer vs Gonzales/Molteni), as well as bits and pieces of the matches Mykael and Elias Ymer played in singles, the qualifying matches of my fellow Romanian, Nicholas David Ionel, as well as a few games of Denis Shapovalov’s and Emil Ruusuvuori’s matches.

The rest of the week was work, work, work and more intensive work. I mentioned at the beginning of the post and will do it again: we were so lucky to have a regular-sized team this year. And we were lucky to see their commitment and willingness to align with the values that were passed on to us and that we took even further, of making sure we deliver the best experience a world class event could deliver and even more. Maybe one day I will go into detail of what we actually do. I can say that this year was all about running errands, baking birthday cakes, fixing the coffee machine, and as always, securing those precious water bottles. 

This is one of the weeks of the year that comes and goes in the blink of an eye, and after 8-9 days of focusing only on tennis, we find ourselves eagerly waiting for next year’s edition, though still recovering after the current one. Looking forward to new tennis adventures, but until then: 2022 game, set, match, championship: Arévalo/Rojer and Holger Rune.