British events in 2013

The Knight · Challenger qualifying

British events in 2013

philwrig · Hall of fame

I spoke to Leon about this at Nottingham and he put up a perfectly reasoned argument for the current strategy.
Reasons for:
1. Saved £65000 to date
2. GB players have been mopping up most of the points, he gave me some stats on that as well.
3. We don't have enough players around the top 200 level who would benefit from holding more challengers, basically foreign players would come in and mop up the points and the prize money.
4. The idea is to have 26 British based tournaments mostly futures including a small number of high level British tour events so that players that have no funding don't have to leave the country and can bulid up points/ prize money without the extra cost of travelling abroad. The bonus scheme is also there to supplement these types of players earnings.
5. As soon as we get more Challenger ranked players( hopefully very soon ) the schedule will be revisited and the spread will be changed again.

Bob in Spain · Tennis legend

Sounds like the "party line" as that was pretty much what Beechy was telling me in Spain earlier in the year.

Coup Droit · Tennis legend

philwrig wrote:
I spoke to Leon about this at Nottingham and he put up a perfectly reasoned argument for the current strategy.
Reasons for:
1. Saved £65000 to date
2. GB players have been mopping up most of the points, he gave me some stats on that as well.
3. We don't have enough players around the top 200 level who would benefit from holding more challengers, basically foreign players would come in and mop up the points and the prize money.
4. The idea is to have 26 British based tournaments mostly futures including a small number of high level British tour events so that players that have no funding don't have to leave the country and can bulid up points/ prize money without the extra cost of travelling abroad. The bonus scheme is also there to supplement these types of players earnings.
5. As soon as we get more Challenger ranked players( hopefully very soon ) the schedule will be revisited and the spread will be changed again.

Point one, the financial saving, seems fair.

But points 2 and 3 seem to imply that the LTA's only goal is to somehow provide some 'cheap' points and 'cheap' cash for the current GB players.

This seems extremely short-sighted.

In my view, the LTA should be trying to raise the bar of tennis overall in the UK. For the current players, the up-and-coming players and the public who are both supporters (providers of cash) and 'providers' of potential players in the future.

Show-casing a bit of high quality tennis throughout the year, not just Wimbledon and immediately pre-Wimbledon, would be of huge benefit to a lot of our players, and to aspiring players.

But instead we have a year full of lowly futures and then a sudden feeding-frenzy of Wimbledon and pre-Wimbeldon very high challengers. No wonder the press go nuts. And looking at all the players who won a match in the Qualifiers, or almost won a match in the MD (all against far higher ranked players) - it's not a huge number but it's not nothing - if it'd been a 'normal' 35 or 50k, those numbers might be three times that - the home benefit can play a very important role.

RJA · Hall of fame

I will add more to this tomorrow, I am currently too drunk to say much, but I must immediately respond to point 1, that the LTA saved "£65000". This is absolute peanuts, it is roughly 0.1% of the LTA's budget. To cite it as a reason to justify the strategy is quite simply pathetic.

paulisi · Tennis legend

Hopefully with so many British players moving into the 250-500 ranking, shouldn't the LTA look to switch some of the 10K tournaments into 15K's and start to throw in a few more 25K challengers?

Big GB automatic entries into main draw for Nottingham and Chiswick.

RJA · Hall of fame

The week 40 event that was originally scheduled for Cardiff has seemingly been moved to Sunderland.