It was an early start this morning leaving at 5.15am for the 225 mile journey to Wrexham. The roads were clear as you’d expect on a Sunday morning and the journey was going well until I hit Wales and the fog came down and reduced visibility to about 10 metres!
I finally got to the tennis centre in Wrexham around 9am and was pleasantly surprised to see that the indoor centre had been extended last October so now they have 7 indoor hard courts and two indoor mini tennis courts to go with the 11 outdoor hard courts. It’s a great centre; I just wish it was closer to Kent!!
I spent the next 5 or 6 hours watching the matches and talking with the other coaches and parents explaining my plans to try to make travelling to these type of events more affordable and therefore more accessible to more players. A lot of coaches and academies have said that they would like me to add U16 & U14 Tennis Europe events to my calendar so I’m going to look into that for later next year.
There were some great performances today from the British players and the attitudes of all the players that I watched were much better than I’ve seen in the past at these events. Harry Simpson was only a few points away from taking out Denys Gevel, the top seed in qualies, after he took the 1st set 7-5 and lead 5-2 in the second before the Ukrainian tightened up his play and took the next 9 games in a row to lead 4-0 in the third. To Harry’s credit he remained professional even though his play at the start of the 3rd set was quite erratic. His head never dropped and he continued to flight hard taking the next 3 games to get the set back on serve. Unfortunately the top seed upped his game coming out with some massive passing shots when under pressure and took the next 3 games to take the match. Harry remained professional in defeat and I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of him in the future.
Another notable match was 11 year old Anastasia Mikheeva who took out no.1 seed in qualies Helena Kuppig. Anastasia was very focused from the start and her intensity and desire made her a very tough competitor today – I look forward to her match tomorrow against fellow qualifier Anais Gabriel.
There were also notable wins for Nicholas Nugent who beat the no.6 seed, Joe Woolley who beat the no.7 seed, Olivia Tomkins who beat the no.3 seed and Bethan Taylor who destroyed the no.8 seed 6-0, 6-2. All in all 10 British players qualified; let’s hope the extra matches in qualies will help them to gain Tennis Europe points in the main draw tomorrow.
It was great to catch up with some of the coaches that I haven’t seen in a while, John Hicks is still going strong for Win Tennis – any time you get a chance to chat to John take it, he’s so passionate and positive and he’s been there and done it at all levels. Dan Sanders (who runs the academy at Wrexham and is individual coach to Lisa Whybourn) is always welcoming and we have some great debates over British Tennis! It was also good to catch up with Mark Winship who explained how MY Tennis has taken over from the former Tennis Midlands setup at Loughborough – great to hear that things are back on track there.
There were quite a few coaches from various academies in Great Britain there today but I was still surprised at the number of British players that were there without a coach. It’s events like these where coaches need to see their players compete and if the parents can’t afford to pay the coach then the coach really needs to be doing it for free. Yes it’s a Sunday and it’s out of the way in Wrexham but this is an international event and coaches working with this level of player need to see the standard and be there to see how the players react under pressure. Hopefully they’ll be more there for the main draw tomorrow.
