The day started at 7am with everybody clearly looking “awake and lively”. It took us until 10am precisely to arrive at the National Tennis Centre, after a very quiet and dozy minibus journey.
Christine Sprowell, Head of Further Education for the Tennis Foundation hosted the day, we had a small lecture from Christine about her role within the NTC and what that entailed. Then, a tour of the facilities by one of three Duty Managers, and knew the building and facilities inside out.
The tour included all of the indoor acrylic courts, offices, altitude centre and gyms used by some famous faces such as Andy Murray and David Beckham who we narrowly missed out on seeing as we arrived a couple of days afterwards. Also, we were taken around the, what seemed to be an abundance of outdoor clay and grass courts, seeing the life-size statues of Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic it was a photo opportunity not to be missed, the statues had been imported from the Shanghai Masters !
After our tour, we headed back to the lecture room for a further talk by Rob Dearing, Head of Participation & Clubs, regarding his role of promoting Tennis as a sport to the general public through, Clubs, Schools and older generations. We also discussed about future, and possible ideas to help links between our Sixth Form programme and the public to boost tennis as a sport.
This was quickly followed by our chance to play, and session of Cardio Tennis with Sam Richardson who was described, Mr Cardio Tennis UK, as one of the main organizers and promoters of Cardio Tennis in the UK. After a very intense session of tennis, running around and bad memory of names, we all headed straight to the showers, and came back to a buffet lunch.
As we all came to the end of lunch, we had an interactive session with George Donnelly, who works in competitions, it was really informative and gave us the chance to offer our ideas about engaging our age group 16-19 years and keeping trying to get more people to stay in the game after the age of 13-15 years or getting our peers to re start.
It was now, time to go home and after a full day on tennis, tours and Mandy’s camera, everybody was tired out and looking forward to a good rest on the journey back. Everybody thoroughly enjoyed the day and it was a great experience and a great trip!! A HUGE thank you to Patrick Lodge for driving the mini bus and allowing us to stop for more food on the way home!
Report by Tom Hunt, Yr 12 student at Writhlington School
Mandy Stonier, Head of Tennis at Writhlington said: ‘This is the first of several trips we plan for the tennis squad to give them an insight into working within sport, and the business opportunities available, taking them in school holidays ensures they do not miss lessons which is the major principle behind this 6th sporting programme thus ensuring the students gain a full and formal education as well as enjoying the benefits of being associated with tennis. Their behaviour was impeccable and a credit to the school, we would like to thank Christine Sprowell from the Tennis Foundation for hosting the day and allowing our students to have access to the fine facilities of our National Governing Body and the quality of the speakers & staff that were available – nice lunch too!!’