Talks a lot of sense regarding:

- Independent academies. The LTA have so far not succeeded in bring through players, therfore their policies, coaching methods etc must not be as effective as they assume them to be. Based on this it would make sense to give individual academies more control whilst not withdrawing funding - the phrase 'they couldn't do any worse' is both coined by DL and applicable here.
- Roger Draper is not the right man for the job. Anyone who believes that GB isn't producing players due to collective poor attitude on all of their behalfs is most definitely out of touch. France has 6,000 indoor courts, we have 1,800. Lets start there shall we.

This is the first time that I have heard David Lloyd speak, previously I have judged him solely on the awful carpet courts in his tennis centres (ice rinks provide more bounce!), and I have to admit that he talks a lot of sense. If only that wasn't a banned commodity within the LTA.

Gee, and more than £40,000 in bonuses  

1,800 against 6,000; we have 30% as many indoor courts as France. That's the sort of useful statistic that rarely features in these discussions. Actually I thought the disparity would be more than that, but of course France also has a slightly warmer climate, so they don't need the indoor courts quite as much as we do. But increasing that number (providing the extra courts are well used of course) is the sort of thing we should be focusing on. It is an area in which targets can be set and performance can be judged. No one can control whether a country happens to produce a world beater, there is a great deal of randomness about that, but things like the number of courts can be improved steadily. One of the problems with British tennis is that the debate is a stuck record, stuck on emotive rhetorical points (Wimbledon millions, big salaries, class war blah, blah, blah) and measurable, practical issues directly connected with getting more people to hit tennis balls back and forth across nets, and to do so better, are barely discussed.

-- Edited by Osomec on Tuesday 9th of March 2010 03:04:32 AM

Tennis is a very technical sport and players require a lot of coaching to reach their potential. If we want to have thousands upon thousands of players receiving serious coaching, it will cost vast sums. People say that the LTA should build loads of indoor centres and give free coaching to the zillions of hungry working class kids who are allegedly out there (though in all the places in England that I've lived it has been the middle class kids who had the work ethic, passed on to them by their parents, who also have a good work ethic which is why they became middle class or have managed to remain middle class). But the LTA doesn't have the money to do that. I remember reading a suggestion that the money spent on the National Tennis Centre could have paid for fifty centres in the inner cities or the north. Poppy****! You can't build and staff an indoor tennis centre for less than a million pounds in S****horpe any more than you can in London.

A few tens of millions is not enough to fund the tennis infrastructure that people say they want. What is the total investment in tennis in France or Spain? Far more than the LTA's budget, if everything we hear about the scale of tennis in those countries is true. I remember reading Judy Murray's comments about how the Challenger tournaments in Italy each have multiple local sponsors, while here everyone expects the LTA to do everything. In other countries tennis is higher up the sporting tree, and more people are willing to fund it. More people pay to play - mainly middle class people because they are the ones that can best afford to play our relatively expensive sport - and councils spend more on tennis due to its appeal to the local middle class, which controls the council purse. 

-- Edited by Osomec on Tuesday 9th of March 2010 01:54:45 PM

that post above was one of the best and most informed posts ive seen on this forum...although im not sure about middle class kids having a great deal more work ethic wtih regards to sport (speaking as one!)

Another thing to add is that both professional tournaments I have attended in the last year one at Newcastle and one at Sunderland were not advertised in the local press and thus had no more than a handful of spectators. Only those who follow tennis very closely would have had any clue of their existence. That can't help when it comes to selling the game of tennis. I think we all have to realise that only two weeks matter for 99.999999% of the public and those are at the end of June and the start of July.

rains a lot.