French club

I somehow ended up on the French clubs site the other day (http://www.fft.fr/epreuves-equipes) and it's amazing how well-developed a competition it is. The top team seems to be Club Jean Bouin in Paris - in the last match of 2007 (during the ATP off-season), they fielded Gasquet, Monfils, Mathieu, Llodra & Roger-Vasselin, who faced a team representing a club from Rennes containing Vliegen, Kohli and Gicquel!

The system goes down through lower divisions, as Ed says, and covers lots of age groups - perhaps it's no wonder that France has inspired such a lot of players to get into the top 100 if the kids in the clubs get to see all this high level tennis happening on a regular basis!

I'm not surprised you play in it if it pays that well and includes flights - I guess plenty of the Futures and Challengers players must use it to help finance their participation in ranked tournaments - I'm pretty sure I've heard of both Bloomers and Sherwood doing that when they were regulars in Challenger main draws, to name but two.

Other things (and another question, if you aren't regretting offering to answer them yet )

It's brilliant that in Africa, the Futures are treated as big events - I think Slabba was telling David about that too when he won a Future last year. I'm sure the LTA could make at least the Challengers into fan-friendly events and get more people in to watch if they really wanted to, perhaps if they weren't spoilt with Wimby, Queens, etc, they'd think about it.

I'm glad you think it's nice that there are plenty of us here who follow what's going on (it's got to be better than being ignored, eh! ) and that you don't take the comments that result from the inevitable ups and downs to heart.

It's mildly disappointing  that you don't chase milestones (like the '500') in the way that we like to pretend you all do  but great that you're confident enough for it not to matter. I guess how lucky (or not) you are with draws has quite a lot to do with exactly where you are in the 400-800 range and that's why a lot of the Brits who don't quite manage to break out of that level fluctuate so much from year to year. Perhaps how many Brits there are in the top 500 (or whatever) is a more meaningful measure than who they actually are.

So what is your short-medium term aim, apart from continuing to improve? If the numbers don't mean that much, is the main aim to get to the level where you can be seeded in just about any Future, then to get to the level where you can regularly get DAs into Challengers (and be competitive in them) and so on?

-- Edited by steven at 22:26, 2008-02-18

Hi Edward, thanks for answering all these questions, it's great to hear your answers and thank you for being so willing to answer in detail. Just wanted to say welcome, as I'm not sure it's actually been said yet - though the response you've gotten should convey how welcome you are!! All the questions I can think of so far have been answered so I'll stick with a simple good luck in your next match, we'll be hoping for a win.

Welcome to you too Indian Warrior, I can make a guess as to who you are but regardless as to whether I'm right or not, welcome to the board and thanks for posting. Please continue! how often do you play in the Indian league?

A question for anyone who knows...are the french/german/indian leagues etc kind of the equivalent to the British tour?

I agree with Steven that the french club system sounds like it goes a long way towards explaining their wealth of great players. To have young tennis players affiliated with a club that fields superstars like Gasquet and Monfils must be a massive motivation. With the money in the british game you would think we might be able to do something similar - 2000 euros per match for the top players seems like a bargain with the LTA's budget (I'm going to assume that the clubs will get an LTA subsidy).

Good morning guys. Today hasn't got off to the best start with Olivia taking a loss to an Italian girl 7-6 6-2 I think it was.
With all the singles matches being played and only 5 courts, me and Fitzy play 6th match on and Bains is 4th on.
With my goals I prefer to keep them pretty private. But constant improvement is the main thing, which I have been doing last couple years.
And yes Nigeria is CET time.
I'm going to head off to the club now to watch Bains play Tupy.Will be online at some point tonight and update you on how the rest of the day goes.

RedCabbage wrote:

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I agree with Steven that the french club system sounds like it goes a long way towards explaining their wealth of great players. To have young tennis players affiliated with a club that fields superstars like Gasquet and Monfils must be a massive motivation. With the money in the british game you would think we might be able to do something similar - 2000 euros per match for the top players seems like a bargain with the LTA's budget (I'm going to assume that the clubs will get an LTA subsidy).

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This explains a lot about British tennis?
In the immediate past would you have seen Greg or Tim promoting at club level let alone playing? (Although now they are out of a job they are more than interested!) And more recently would Andy play (If it was the right surface of course)? I can imagine that Jamie M might.

By the way there IS a similar scheme run by the LTA - the Kia National Club League (NCL) and yes I believe the players do get some form of payment, but I doubt if they get free flights and yes they can/do include foreign guest players.
LTA NCL 2007







-- Edited by mjd at 12:01, 2008-02-19

Great to hear from another professional tennis player. Good luck to you Ed and Fitzy

Hey, Stircrazy, where have you been for the past 24 hours?! If you look back to page 2 of this thread, second post, you'll see that those are yesterday's doubles results you've just given us!