Tennis
Most of you will have seen tennis courts dotted about your area. Some in parks can seem scruffy and uninteresting and the ones at tennis clubs can seem too scary to try and play on as everyone seems to know what they’re doing.
Well, here at bsporty we want to tell you all about what a great game tennis is for EVERYONE. Your mum, dad, cousin, brother, sister, aunty, uncle, grannie, grandad – you name them, they can play. Excitingly for our readers though, the LTA (that’s the name of the organisation that runs all tennis in this country and stands for the Lawn Tennis Association) is trying to get kids like YOU involved.
How are they doing that?
They have set up Tennis for Kids aimed at 4-11 year olds. If you go to clubspark on www.lta.org.uk and put in your postcode or even pop in to the tennis club or leisure centre in your town, village, city, they will tell you how and where to start.
But in a few words:
It costs £25
Each child gets:
6 coaching sessions,
Their own Babolat tennis racket (that’s the make Nadal uses),
A set of balls,
A personalised t-shirt
and all of this gets delivered directly to your home.
Wow.
You will then learn the basics of tennis and see if you like it.
So far this scheme has introduced 50,000 kids to tennis since 2016.
Not only this, but you may see advertisements where you live for the Nature Valley Big Tennis Weekend which are free open days across the country all year. However, there are some extra special ‘Big Weekends’ in July and September. The clubs provide rackets and balls and the sessions suit all ages and abilities from mini tennis with soft balls and small courts, to cardio tennis (fitness with a tennis element), free play and loads of other fun games to take part in. Keep an eye out and pop down to your local club to see what’s happening.
So what have you got to lose? Give it a try.
In between playing tennis yourself and having fun check out what’s happening in the tennis world in June. It’s a huge time for tennis in the UK as the WTA and ATP Tennis competitions are on. That means that if you live near Nottingham (10-16 June), Birmingham (17-23 June) or Eastbourne (23-29 June) or Queen’s tennis club in West London (17-23 June) you can watch some top quality men’s and women’s tennis to get you even more inspired. Each venue is holding family days for part of the competition which means you can get in to watch the tennis for £2 if you are under 16.
At Eastbourne Caroline Wozniacki (the defending champion) and Johanna Konta are set to play as is British number 2 Cameron Norrie and 2016 finalist Richard Gasquet.
BTSport is showing the WTA tournaments and Amazon Prime the ATP. Queen’s is on the BBC (1-14 July).
To purchase tickets or to access more information head to www.lta.org.uk/major-tennis-events.
If you enjoy watching and learning about tennis in June you have more to enjoy in July as it’s Wimbledon (1st - 14th July) . This major tennis competition is on the BBC every day for 2 weeks so you can catch up with matches and watch the highlights every day after school.
