I've been working and staying in London mid-week for six months now and still not managed to play a tennis club league match...despite my best efforts, for the following reasons:
My work have a tennis club, but don't play in the winter leagues. The next club nearest my work don't play in any leagues at all. The next club nearest me, which I joined, play their matches on the weekend (when I'm not here). I have then visited three other larger clubs further away from where I work/live and found:
Club 1. They had 2 superstar teams above my standard and then 3 teams way below my standard
Club 2. Only had 2 winter men's teams (4 players per team) for a club of over 600 members
Club 3. Was a pay&play park club and I couldn't find easily how to get into a team despite going to about 4-5 advanced coaching nights
I think something is fundamentally wrong with the club system that I can't easily find/play in some tennis league matches of my own standard over winter.
So after spending hours and hours on all of the above I gave up and I started a new competition myself. A group of players, arranging doubles matches between themselves. You can play in a set pair or you can find a partner in the group. You arrange a match and then either play a few sets in the same pairs or change partners and play one set with each partner. Not rocket science but amazingly nothing like this exists in London. I've had two very enjoyable matches so far and really hope the idea takes off. If it does take off then you could have multiple divisions and all sorts of standards of people playing matches, where and when they want, against other players of a similar standard! Even though you are playing doubles, sets won count for your individual score, so after a couple of months the players who have won the most sets will be promoted.
Try contacting the Middlesex LTA. They used to run various postal leagues for adults and juniors in the London area.
And good luck with your own venture. How come you are able to get so much tennis going as an individual in comparison to the powers that be??? Gold star to you I think.
Yes I did speak with Middlesex LTA, they do an annual postal league in summer, but it's just singles. I used to run some postals myself, and Middlesex LTA were saying they would do more if they could, so I've put one on the LTA website and will see how that goes.
To be fair to the powers that be, they've massively backed Local Tennis Leagues on a national scale and they now have over 10000 singles players in their park based leagues, which is a great success. I'm a very small contributor compared to them.
