Ward looking to step up

James Ward is looking to build on his recent performances after helping Great Britain to their Davis Cup victory over Turkey.

Briton hoping to build on recent efforts

James Ward is looking to build on his recent performances after helping Great Britain to their Davis Cup victory over Turkey. The 23-year-old has enjoyed a fine month, reaching the quarter-finals of the AEGON International in Eastbourne before picking up a Futures title in Manchester. He won both his singles matches in the 5-0 defeat of Turkey over the weekend and despite still being ranked outside the top 300, he is confident of producing more stellar performances this summer. "I've been playing well for the last few weeks so I've just been building on each week and trying to get better, and this is a nice week to top it off. "Hopefully I'll get to the top 100 as soon as possible but there's a process to go through and a lot of hard work to be done to reach that stage. "But I'm putting the hard work in and hopefully the next few weeks in the States will be good ones. "I'm not going to put any pressure on myself but I think within the next year and a half I can be knocking on the door of being a top 100 player." Great Britain team-mate Jamie Baker also won his two singles matches against Turkey and is now hoping to build on that in Challenger events in the US and Brazil. "It's a massive confidence boost," he said. "It's my first live rubber that I've won for GB and the first best-of-five-sets match that I've won as well so that's quite a big thing to get off my back. "I've got five tournaments on the bounce leading up to US Open qualifying so hopefully I've got a bit of momentum leading into that. "Everyone's come away from here as an improved player as well as winning the match, so that's really the main thing."