Friday 9th December 2011
It’s amazing how time flies by . . . it was a year ago when I first came to this event (after launching International Travelling Coach at the end of November 2010) to promote and advertise my schedule for 2011. Not much has changed in Wrexham but this year I’m here with players in both qualies and main draw so it’s going to be a great week.
My recent link with “European Tennis Tours” (www.europeantennistour.com) based in Ibiza has resulted in 14 year old Samuel Ibanez Roig joining me this week for the boy’s event. Sam has come over with his aunt (Antonia) for the week and it was a big step for Sam as he has never left Ibiza before let alone compete in an International event in Wales!
I met Sam and Antonia at Gatwick airport at 10am this morning before we made the 4 and a half hour journey to Wrexham. The journey was quite straightforward but it was rather quiet in the car as Sam doesn’t speak a word of English and Antonia’s English is very limited!!
We arrived at Wrexham just before 3pm to find that the tournament did not have any practice courts booked and so the players couldn’t train before they compete tomorrow. This was very disappointing and I think the only other time I’ve had this happen in the last 14 years was back in January at Teen Tennis in Bolton. However, because I know Dan Sanders and the team up here at the Wrexham High Performance Centre very well they did us a massive favour and moved one of their squads from 2 courts to 1 to let us train for an hour. We were very lucky to be able to do that and I think Sam was very glad to be able to hit for an hour as he’d never played indoors before and was used to very slow outdoor clay. After struggling to make contact with the ball at the start of the session (!!) Sam eventually relaxed and hit the ball well.
By this time it was around 5pm so we signed in and were told that Sam was still 25th Alternate – this means that if everyone on the acceptance list signed in he would miss out on the qualifying by 25 players. You might then ask why he’s made the journey from Ibiza to Barcelona, then from Barcelona to London and finally up to North Wales when he’s nowhere near getting into the tournament? The plain answer is that when you haven’t got a ranking you have to give these things a go to try and get in to events. I remember travelling to Sweden with a player who was 65th Alternate and he got in, his parents were unsure if it was worth the risk but I said we should give it a go. They trusted my opinion and he not only got in but he ended up qualifying and gaining his first Tennis Europe points ?
After Sam’s first visit to Sainsbury’s to stock up on food we headed back to the hotel to shower and change before returning to the tennis centre to check on the draw. To our delight Sam got into the qualifying! It was disappointing to see that other British players who were on the alternate list didn’t bother to sign in and I actually had a conversation with a HPC coach and two players this week recommending them to give it a go but they chose not to – if they had they would have easily got in.
Once again the girl’s draw is very very disappointing; for those of you that have been reading my Blogs during this year you’ll know that I’ve constantly brought up the fact that every one of the qualifying draws in the British girl’s international events have had byes in them. Today there were 8 byes and after the quality of the qualifying draws this year I hope something is done to make sure the centres that receive the £4 million that the LTA put high performance tennis are made accountable. EVERY SINGLE IHPC / HPC should have players here in both the boy’s and the girl’s draw and if they haven’t then questions should be asked as to whether they should be receiving the funding that they do. We’re all in this to create international tennis players so why aren’t players trying to compete in international events that are on their doorstep??
After booking practice courts and checking the schedule for tomorrow we met up with Rob Booth and Selina Briggs from West Hants HPC for dinner before going back to the Travelodge for an early night.
Schedule for tomorrow:
Samuel Ibanz Roig (ESP) vs (11) Calum MacGeoch (GBR) (907) – 4th round on after 10am
