I think the most interesting point here is that I imagine so many of our top players have emerged through playing tennis in tennis clubs from a very young age and then the good ones picked up on and developed as well as they can be. But at the start that group is by nature essentially children of tennis orientated and / or pretty privileged parents, the tennis club fraternity.

It is no sort of cross-section of the nation's youngsters and on the whole very many really talented young ball players will barely ever see a tennis court or have anything much to draw them to the sport.

So, effectively we are really limiting ourselves and the tennis pool we start with is essentially not a talent piol , but a privilege pool. OK, there may be some genes passed down from some tennis parents, but that is essentially what we have.

Now with many starting at a young age, the better ones can be worked on and polished over many years and emerge as very decent tennis players. But in many ways, with this being a small subsection of the population and most not starting out because of inherent real sporting ability, it is in some ways luck if an absolute star emerges such as an Andy Murray, the son of a pro tennis player turned coach.

The big question is how do we attract the "mega athletes" in to at least give tennis a decent crack and from a fairly young age. Do the LTA for instance ever organise and run widely advertised and cheap / free open weekends aimed at attacting good young athletes with good coaches on hand and information as to how to progress an interest in tennis ? What do they do to try and engage and capture the mega athletes / ball players ?

With regards to Croatia and Serbia, whilst there will be many cultural and sporting differences there from the UK, it is worth finding out what talent identification programs they have and how their very top players got into tennis.

Well, 10 minutes on the Croatia tennis site looking at their national competitions:

1. They have a national league with 3 divisions, promotion/relegation 8-10 teams in each division that play each other and then have play-offs/finals. Basically the way we run football. 

2. For individuals 2013 calendar has 29 U18 events, 46 U16 events, 83 U14 events, 89 U12 events. I can't make sense of the U10 and U8 calendars but I think they are regional competitions rather than national with one national 'masters' competition in each age group.

3. Like us, they rank their junior events grade 1 - 7 with like us only the national championships being grade 1.

4. They can produce a website that is easier to find information on through google translate than the LTA's is in its native language.

However, what seems to be the most obvious and significant difference is their junior events are spread fairly evenly at different grades throughout the whole year. If were willing to play across say 3 grades (like most juniors do at ITF level) and could travel around the country (it's only 250miles side-to-side), you could play every other week. More likely would be to play every month.

Our national/regional junior competitions run for 3 months in the summer and 3 months in the winter, with the winter competiions only have 4 weekends of events for each age group with an event at 6-10 locations nationwide each weekend. 

-- Edited by RBBOT on Friday 22nd of March 2013 11:26:26 PM

I tend to agree on the luck side. The most extreme example, to my mind, is women's tennis in the US. A fairly dedicated and iconoclastic father decides that his two little girls will be tennis players and starts to train them; they're good athletes and enjoy the game ... and "US tennis" gets two number 1s, 48 (if you count singles and doubles) GS titles, and a bunch of Olympic gold medals. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with "US tennis."

Also agree on the "numbers of players" side. I don't know if it's statistically significant, but there are more US women in the top 250 than there are men (25 to 20) ... 80% of whom were born (yes, really. I did need to count twice to be sure I was correct) after the Williams sisters began to find success. At a guess, as people have commented, if you have stars that make tennis look like something that's "cool" to do, people will do it. And the more that do ....

On the "institutions matter" side, one institution that I would suspect is making a diffference (globally, given the diversity of nationalities involved) is the university system in the US. Again, it's partially a numbers thing. That system's virtue is that it allows people who are good, but not yet quite good enough to go on Tour -- or not sure they are ... or with other priorities -- to continue playing seriously longer than they would otherwise be able to. The result is that some of the later developers, who might have given up at 18 before they were at a point where they could play professionally, actually both get an education and "make it" as Tour players.

Firstly I have enjoyed following this forum for some time - it is great to be able to follow the exploits of all the British tennis players who don't get any press coverage.

I feel it is more than the population or just luck, the priority that sport is given to children and of course the facilities which are very important. We moved to Pittsburgh in the USA 18 months ago and although I was aware of the higher profile of school and college sports here it is not until you live here that you realize just what a different level youth sport generally is here compared to the UK. When I was at school in England we were lucky to get 10 spectators to a match who weren't parents, here the high school (American) football matches regularly draw crowds of more than 1,000 with perhaps 10 times that for championship matches, and a even a recent championship basketball match got 3,000.

The range of sports played at schools is far wider than in the UK, and every high school round here has a tennis team. If you are good at one sport then it appears to be encouraged to try a different one. Getting into the school team has high status, and the commitment levels are high too- my daughter tried out for the high school soccer team and they had training 4 days a week for several weeks followed by a 3 day try-out - when she was in England it was a case of if you had boots then you were in the school team, and 1 practice a week for those who could be bothered to turn-up. There is a law (not sure whether at state or national level) that ensures that all schools and colleges have to give equal opportunities to girls in sports, and not surprisingly the outcome is far higher level of participation in sports by girls which I am sure has lead to the success of the US women in sports.

The college system with sports scholarships is a big driver too, so kids are encouraged to keep going at sports if they show promise in the hope that they can get a full or partial scholarship. The profile of sports at college is huge - the football coach will earn more than the chancellor.

Thirdly the facilities - the school sports facilities are shared with the public so we have 6 outdoor tennis courts 1 mile from our house which are open 9 months of the year and I know of 2 more sets of courts within 5 miles, plus 2 indoor complexes both 20-30 minutes drive away. So you can spend $30 for a basic racket and play for free outside to see if you like it.

I absolutely agree with Ratty that dragging huge numbers of kids onto tennis courts who have never played before, and who in today's world would probably never step onto a court in their lives is critical...........I would focus on the young sporty athletes who we know are unlikely to have tried tennis, which means big cities, poorer sections of society, and lots of subsidies and free coaching/equipment.......it's the Gael Monfils type of kid that the FTF is able to attract in France, but we singularly fail to in GB.

But I don't think its just this, I think there is a danger that the review and appraisal process could also be self-fulfilling....especially if there is a certain amount of "closed shop" mentality.

In what is a very technical sport, a rather expensive sport, and one which historically has been very middle-class and "tennis family" dominated in GB, there is a real danger that the "best" young players almost exclusively come from identikit backgrounds............

........how can a very average young child athlete (10 and under), coached to within an inch of their life from a very young age, often from a tennis obsessed or tennis coach family, perhaps knowing all the right people, and for some even with access to a tennis court at home......fail to play tennis better than other superb young athletes who may barely have played before, and only have access to average coaches. Which is rather helpful when being tested and assessed. If those "lucky" kids then make up the majority of places on GB training and funding squads (plus also getting first dibs on public school tennis scholarships to Reeds, Epsom, St George's etc), it reinforces the problem.

I'm probably about to be very unfair here, but I would almost certainly fall into the middle class bracket myself, so I can have a little latitude. I accept there may be huge concidences here, and that there may be superstars amongst them, but there are lots of names like Joshua, Daniel and Oliver among the pro and junior GB men's ranks, and plenty of names like Katie, Lucy, Molly, Emily and Pippa on the womens/girls side. I'm sure if I looked hard I'd find some Tilly's, India's and Holly's too. How many of them are genuine athletes vs how many have been playing tennis from kindergarden - and how many are competing in nationals and getting funding? 

When the type of names we see making up the bulk of GB youth tennis funding spots has changed, THEN we will know something has genuinely changed at the heart of British tennis.

-- Edited by korriban on Monday 25th of March 2013 09:52:36 AM

If the standard of tennis locally and elsewhere within this country was such that you didn't need to travel abroad to find a high standard opponent, wouldn't that be an improvement? If so, then I can see a large increase in available courts would be of benefit.

Maybe the not the complete answer, but surely the bigger the base the higher the peak.

tennischildandbroke wrote:

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The point is, we never had a shortage of courts or court time. There are courts available and they are not currently used enough in my view.

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 But most people will not know where they are.  Tennis in this country needs to drag people in.  Promote the hell out of it.  Competitions, freebies, get famous players to come a couple of times a year.  

 The aim of British Tennis should be that every child in this country has tried this fantastic game.  Until then we have failed and every slam win or final from Andy is just a sticking plaster.  

 We cannot just rely on such a small base in perpetuity.  This isn't a criticism of yourself tcab, it is just a case of saying that things are broken and perhaps always have been and must be fixed.