Oh No!

Something quite bad has happened for Colin in the last few weeks because after Bronx he was very upbeat, planning to play the GB futures and challengers in the autumn plus some of the European indoor events. He was very pleased with how the doubles has been going and his coach reckoned he could be a top 20 doubles player.

In singles he's been on a bit of a plateau this year but stepping up to challenger level was going to be tough and it would have taken him a little while to get used to the harder competition. Although his ranking has dropped back, he's been playing at a much higher standard lately, beating top 200 players.

Hopefully he will continue to play some GB tournaments while at uni and maybe continue his career after his degree. I don't know the full story yet, so I'm just speculating at the moment.

But we have a host of kids in the 12-17 year old group who could become pros.

That's a real shame but i guess he has to do whats right for him so I wish him all the best (whilst hoping that he does return to the game) maybe having some time off is all he needs to regain the hunger and passion.

Niall wrote:

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That's really dissapointing Colin has showed that he is a really good prospect and after a bit of a plateau since March I thought he was ready to kick on again. I hope it is just that Colin wants to complete his degree while he is still young and he can remember what he did in the first three years.

Colin has always been pretty unconventional in his approach to the sport. There are lots of British players striving (probably in vein) for the kind of start he made in summer 2003 but Colin went back to Uni for a couple of years. I wonder where he would be if he had commited to a career in tennis at that stage. I'd really like to see Colin commit to several consequetive years in tennis as I think he could go far, hopefully a bit of a break will allow him to do that.

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He may just need a little time away from tennis to recover from whatever happened in the last month. Hopefully he'll keep playing at uni and maybe his old coach Euan McGinn who runs the squads there, can coax him back onto the tour after he's completed his degree.

Colin dropped off the tour in autumn 2003 because he didn't feel that he was physically ready to compete on the men's game. Part of the reason why a lot of juniors struggle to make the transistion onto the main tour is because they find they're not now just playing U18s but players from 16-35. A lot of players they come up against in the futures and sats and challengers are a lot more physically developed and they end up getting muscled off the court as in the men's game players don't tend to reach their physical peak until about 21-22.

In 2003 Colin was just 19 and he still had a lot of growing left to do [in those 2 years until 2005 he shot up to 6ft 2] and he had yet to properly fill out his frame. His amazing timing and skills at the net enabled him to get enough points in 2003 to take him to about 1200 but it probably wasn't going to be enough to get him to the top 600 and he decided to try and get his degree behind him so he had something to fall back on before having another go at tennis.

I think he meant to complete his degree but a successful partnership with a certain Jamie Murray while competing for North of Scotland in the summer county cup [I don't think they lost a single match] made him change his mind and he took a gap year starting in October 2004 to have a go at tennis. He was actually planning to go back to uni in October 2005 but several fantastic satellites and futures from March-September 2005 changed his mind.