Plymouth’s Josh Steels is looking forward to representing Great Britain’s junior team for a third successive year at wheelchair tennis’s World Team Cup in South Africa, which starts in Pretoria on Monday (25th April).
“It’s always a big honour to represent Great Britain,” said 18-year-old Steels, who made his World Team Cup debut on home soil in Nottingham in 2009, when Britain’s three player narrowly missed out on a place in the final before finishing fourth.
With Steels and fellow young Briton Alfie Hewett having to play all Britain’s singles and doubles rubbers in 2010, they still managed a solid performance to finish fourth again, but with the Great Britain junior team selected by the Tennis Foundation for this year’s prestigious competition back to three players, Steels hopes the team can go at least one position better.
“It’s going to be a big challenge, but with three of us in the team again this year, hopefully we can improve on our two fourth places over the last two years,” added Steels, who trains at Esporta Devonshire in Plymouth under the guidance of coach Richard Stafford, currently clocking up seven hours a week on court and even more training hours in the gym around his A Level studies.
Steels lines up alongside Norfolk-based Hewett and Kettering’s Dermot Bailey for this year’s competition. Britain is one of eight nations that will be vying for success in the junior team event alongside Argentina, Australia, defending champions the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa , the USA and Zimbabwe.
Steels goes into the event as the top ranked of Britain’s three team members listed in the junior rankings published by the International Tennis Federation and as the highest ranked of the three players in the senior men’s world rankings. He earned his first senior ranking in 2010 and is currently ranked just inside the world top 170.
As an A Level student at Lipson Community College A Level, Steels is currently supported by the Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme (TASS) and has shown that he is a player on the upgrade after being the only Briton to reach the field of eight players for January’s prestigious Cruyff Foundation Junior Master in Tarbes, France. He has also turned in some solid performances to reach the quarter-finals at Britain’s first two world ranking tournaments of 2011 in Preston and Sunderland before being beaten by two older, more experienced and higher ranked opponents, include former Great Britain wheelchair basketball Paralympic medallist Ade Adepitan, who has put his own ambitions as a wheelchair tennis player on hold in order to front some of Channel 4’s coverage of disability sport in the lead up to the London 2012 Paralympics.
“London is going to come too soon for me, but my ambitions definitely include trying to qualify to represent Great Britain at a future Paralympics and there’s plenty I’ve learnt from playing people like Ade, who’s been there and done it in another sport.” said Steels, who has been playing wheelchair tennis for just four years.
In term of his current ambitions, the Devon Player is receiving additional support this season by Wilson Sporting Goods, who have supplied him with tennis rackets and a tennis bag, while he also has a new purpose-built tennis wheelchair on order thanks to Get Kids Going, a national charity that helps to supply sports wheelchairs for children and young adults. However, he hopes that representing his country and his ever-improving performances as an individual will encourage even more backing.
“I would love to attract the support of a local company, business or organisation that is willing to help me to achieve my future ambitions. Being selected to represent Great Britain in the World Team Cup and going out on court with Great Britain on the back of my top has given me some of the proudest moments of my career to date and makes me hungry to world hard and achieve more and more success in the future, both as a team member and as an individual.”