SMC1809 wrote:

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When we were members of the local David Lloyd club, there were plenty of courts (and usually the outside courts were available most of the time). However, we stopped as 1) we could no longer spare the £150pm family membership, and 2) We couldn't afford the cost of coaching.

Most local junior football clubs are run by volunteers and most of the coaches give up their time to coach the kids. I'm involved in a local athletics club and similarly most of the coaches are volunteers. How may tennis coaches would be willing to coach younsters for free?

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 This is a difficult one.....volunteers on the football pitches and probably athletic fields are moms and dads with some knowledge of the sport. I don't think you can coach tennis in that way.....my personal belief is that technique is important quite young. So you need a qualified or experienced coach to get this right. I agree though that just getting more people playing tennis is the first step but its just not sexy at the moment so role models matter.

chavkev wrote:

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You only have to look at the recent success cycling has enjoyed. They are not resting on their laurels either:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/21922842

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 Totally agree - so where did they find these new stars? did they build new facilities? did they subsidise a whole bunch of possible stars to eventually filter out the successful cyclists?

Bob in Spain wrote:

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Having lived outside the UK for so long, I can't really comment on the coaching set up and pricing in the UK. What I can tell you is that here in Spain, there is youth coaching at most clubs but it is not free and always run by qualified coaches as opposed to volunteers and parents etc.

However, you don't have to be a member of the club to participate in the coaching sessions. My young neighbour attended coaching sessions at a club near me despite not being a member and was paying approx 5 euros per hour, to be coached in a group of 6 kids. The coaching was available 5 evenings per week with 2 hour sessions and while some kids would go all 5 evenings, others would go for 2 or 3 evenings per week and you just paid accordingly.

I have no idea how 5 euros per hour compares with pricing in the UK.

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 There are similar systems in the UK. So a coach will run a session at a local club with say five or six kids on the court and they run fun activities which cost £5 per child. So as a very knowledgable parent the subsidy from the LTA at an early age and certainly for a trial is not necessary. The LTA should spend their money on promoting the sport ie getting children to try the sport and then supporting performance level players.

What is noticable is the support players in other countries receive from each other. The Spanish, Serbian and Croatian players noticably and genuinely want each other to do well. The same cannot be said of British players, no matter how we and the LTA try to paint over the gloss. I firmly believe this is all down to the system of having an Elite squad  with some players who get everything, and other players who may be just as good, getting zero support, other than a token bonus scheme. Imagine the cost of supporting a player with an individual coach, accomodation and travel and NTC training and health facilities, to next to nothing for another similarly talented player. The gulf is too wide. It should be support for all on a tiered scale judged by results, ranking and age. That would be seen as being fair.

I am not talking sour grapes as I have first hand knowledge of both the"elite player" and non elite player situation. The choice is often subjective but because the rewards are so high, this puts the achiievement of becomining an elite player as important as winning tournaments. The players selected are under pressure to perform, and there is an element of jealousy with those who are not selected. A lot of players know that their own chances of support to progress further themselves can be hindered or improved by the results of their peers. Who can blame them for not seriously supporting each other! 

More junior players yes, but then to a fair banded system of reward and totally do away with the "elite squad" mentality. It has been there in a number of guises for the last 20years and simply doesnt work. Who knows how many players have given up tennis at a young age because of all the politics. Let the LTA be a support for all our talented kids and not a privalaged few and let's have the LTA spread their resources further and wider. 

 

Welcome, tennischildandbroke. Very interesting, and thank you for this insight.

Clearly the types of names doesn't matter in itself and there will clearly be cross-over between classes. But it is just a little indicator, as I have thought myself, of how class related the tennis environment is. But then, anyone not accepting that this is largely the case in the UK, is to me in denial.

The question still stands as to how do we get players from particularly lower class / income families into tennis / to have any real opportunity to try the game ? Many of them I am sure would have the "hunger and desire" if and when they found the sport and found they were quite good.

I have no idea really about the costs of courts and coaching, but while you don't see these as the biggest issues, for many folk these no doubt would be real issues. And if there are not a "load more courts", reasonably accessible both financially and by location , how do we capture the "lost" lower class potential ? Indeed how do we capture the interest of any kids, not already being given such opportunities by their parents ?

As you say, the opportunity is just really not there in schools. And tennis is not at all at the forefront of the.mefia, apart from Wimbledon fortnight

For me, the LTA has to be much more proactive. It is no wonder so few spectators attend very decent class events. Where is the promotion ? Invitations to interested local schoolkids to come slong and watch etc, to engage their interest in the game ?

More particularly, the LTA does need to get into such a the inner cities, advertise and run such as weekend subsidised / free coaching clinics with folk on hand with the necessary follow-up info on pursuing an interest in tennis ? They need to adbertise their wares and indicate a pathway for all, Indeed these could be linked to a local pro tennis event, have a real "tennis week" in such as Shrewsbury, Bath or Sunderland. I am not suggesting they are doing nothing in this area, I just get the impression so much more could be done.

I wonder do you yourself have any thougjtts as to how we capture the interest and make tennis accessible to a.much broader base ? How could tennis maybe more capture and grab the interest of some kids with real athletic and ball sport ability ?

It has clearly been hard for you and you have had to make big sacrifices. Unfortunately it looks to currently be so much hatder for many, many others. Too inaccessible even in the first place.

I have no doubt that the LTA does many good things for these in the system. British tennis so much needs to find ways of being more accessible and broadening its base

If you have an intelligent son who has the ability to go to a good university and forge a successful career but who also has the talents required for tennis and cricket, cricket is the risk free option.  He can carry on his normal schooling, and make the England team at cricket.   If the cricket doesn't work out he can still go to a good university and build a well paid career.  Similarly I know of someone who has is playing club rugby, is in the England U21 rugby team and is studying at Oxford University.  With tennis he would have to give up normal schooling to travel the world at a much younger age.  If he doesn't make the top 50, and the odds will be against that, he will have missed out on so many other chances in life.

I know of someone who did make the top 100 a while back but considers to have suffered financially as a result.  He was approached by a certain Mr and Mrs Henman after their son Tim had just just passed the entrance exam into Radley College - the school of England cricket captain Andrew Strauss until  he was 18. When asked if he should go there or concentrate on his tennis, the reply was 'Go to Radley'.  Luckily they ignored him!

The same argument applies for girls, I was merely following up on Ratty's point on the same skills being needed for cricket as tennis.

Korriban yes I agree with much of what you say. For kids who are good at sports all round, they have so many options and tennis is rarely top of the list (football, rugby, cricket, swimming, even hockey for example). Whereas perhaps in some of these other countries there aren't so many opportunities available to them, or tennis is perceived differently, so kids with other options may be more inclined to make tennis their sport of choice.

Perhaps the problem is that, as a first world country, we are able to give our kids more options (education and sport). Perhaps that is something we should be prepared to accept as being worthwhile given that 99% of kids won't make a living out of any sport. Many just won't take the risk on something that is unlikely to work out and sport drops off as they focus on school and social activities, go on a gap year and then head off to uni. Opportunities which for many in poorer countries just don't exist.

But as the life profile of the top athletes really does prove, it is those who are financially able to devote themselves to the sport that will survive. For most that's family backing, some will be scouted at a young age and get corporate sponsorhip (Sharapova maybe a good example, her family I don't think were well off, but she was basically fully funded from a very young age so they didn't really have much struggle once they were in the US).

Jo Ward once wrote a very good article on the "Russian Method" which was basically that if you throw enough eggs at the wall, eventually one won't break - the point being that for all the Davydenkos, Sharapovas, Safin(a)s, you have dozens if not hundreds of those who languished around the 500 mark and lower, or who never even made it onto the rankings at all. If seen plenty of these players at GB ITFs, and they are nothing special, and so it's not as if these countries have a magic solution - if they did there wouldn't be so many losing in 10k qualies every week (sometimes even to Brits!).

She also pointed out that the training regimes in some of those countries (although this was about 10 years ago) would have social services calling pretty quickly if you tried to do them same in the UK!

Britain is, socially, economically, historically, culturally very different - as so you can't compare them as like for like. There are approaches used in these places that just wouldn't be acceptable here.

More will take the risk in these other countries, because the back-up or safety net of education perhaps isn't readily available as it is here. But only a tiny percentage will ever get anywhere, and an even tinyier percentage who do will be from truling "working class background" whatever that might mean in any particular country.

-- Edited by PaulM on Thursday 28th of March 2013 12:37:09 PM