40 coaches representing 18 Places to Play attended a County Coach Forum at David Lloyd Bristol on 16th October.
The forum was hosted by Julie Jones LTA Tennis Development Manager and Simon Wheatley LTA Talent Performance Coordinator. Julie introduced the forum with a DVD showing highlights of the years successes. The video updated the coaches on what had been happening internationally and nationally within British Tennis over the last 12 months.
Julie then reviewed Avon tennis achievements and thanked the coaches for their significant contributions to tennis locally over the past year.
A few tennis highlights included:
- 60 Places to Play
- 11,000 Registered Club Members
- 9800 British Tennis Members
- 20 Places to Play meeting high standards in terms of Management, Planning, Policies and Programmes - LTA Tennis Clubmark Clubs
- 5 Quality and accessible public Places to Play - LTA Beacon Venues
- 3 LTA Performance Centres: TeamBath International High Performance Centre/David Lloyd Bristol Performance Centre & Coombe Dingle Performance Centre
- 110 LTA Accredited Coaches working in the County/59 Competition Organisers/68 Young Leaders
- 120 School to Club links formed and actioned
- Over 200 schools have received teacher training
- Over 80 school teams took part in the Year 3 & 4 primary school competition
- 149 winter/109 summer sanctioned competitions
- 5 Junior County Cup teams reach the National Finals
- Avon juniors Katie Swan/Claudia Hallsworth/Maria Budin all represented Great Britain
Simon session was focused on talent attraction & identification and he went through the new LTA talent ID resources available to coaches. Simon showed some interesting video clips and stimulated discussion around talent ID.
The Gold Mine Effect, how to find undervalued talent
The second half of Simons session was on court where he was able to demonstrate some practical training drills for 10&U players.
During the workshop Victoria Davies took the opportunity to interview a number of the Avon Coaches and you can hear what they had to say by clicking here.
Avon LTA would like to thank the coaches who attended and David Lloyd Bristol for providing a great lunch.