What a difference a year makes.  Last year, Donald Young was on something of a roll.  He reached the semis of Washington DC.  He reached the fourth round of the US Open.  His ranking was high enough that he could skip Challenger events.  However, rather than continue on that win streak, Young’s career went into a tailspin, as he lost 17 matches in a row.

Recently, he added a new coach to his crew, Roger Smith of the Bahamas who has been coaching Sloane Stephens.  Even with a new coach, it was going to be a tall order to actually beat Roger Federer, Young’s first round opponent.

Initially, Young tried to attack short balls to the Federer backhand.  Although he did have some success with it, pretty soon, the relaxed Federer was having few problems.  Federer served well throughout, though he did get broken a few times.  Young, meanwhile, kept spraying backhands making Federer’s job that much easier.

In the end, Young didn’t have enough game to bother Federer in a 63 62 64 win.

Earlier in the day, rain caused a delay of matches, forcing many matches to be completed late at night.  One match that did get completed in the afternoon was Andy Murray facing Alex Bogomolov.

Last year, Bogomolov beat Murray during a post-Australian Open funk.  Despite the 62 64 61 win, which would suggest an easy straight-forward win, Murray was broken numerous times, only to come back and break Bogomolov even more times.  Even after Murray won the first set, 62, he didn’t start the second set all that well, and so the match was pretty close in the first set.

Murray also began to cramp some in the third set, but managed to get out of it, despite playing rather indifferent tennis.  Murray struggled with his serve, which lead to numerous breaks.

Jack Sock managed an upset of Florian Mayer who retired after 2 sets: 63 62 32.  Fellow American, Denis Kudla, could not overcome Marcel Granollers who won in 4 sets.

Tim Smyczek needed 5 sets to beat fellow American, Bobby Reynolds.

Gilles Simon needed 5 sets to beat Michael Russell.  Russell is known to be very fit, but so is Gilles Simon.  Russell tried a rather successful strategy of hitting hard crosscourt forehands mixed with short slice backhands.  However, Simon  kept moving the ball around, and eventually secured one break then another in the fifth set, to win handily at 61.  That match finished after the Federer match due to the rain that delayed the start of many matches today.

James Blake, who has struggled for a few years, but has lately been playing pretty well, had a nice four set win over Lukas Lacko.

Mardy Fish played three close sets against Go Soeda, but came away with the victory.  He faces Nikolay Davydenko, who beat a qualifier, in the second round.

Tomorrow, Novak Djokovic is the featured evening match, facing Italian, Paolo Lorenzi.