Local coaches John Appleby, Ashleigh Baines and Pete Garrod have seen 24 young players join the afterschool tennis club at Seaham Leisure Centre.
This has only been following a few weeks of schools visits, which is pretty incredible to say the least! It often takes months to see numbers grow to these amounts and just proves how good the coaching team are and importantly the desire and interest from the young players and their parents.
The opportunities came about following years of excellent work from the local School Sport Partnership, with hundreds of young players being given the opportunity to receive coaching and compete in the regional Tony Blair Sports Foundation Year 3 competition. Therefore the local Sport Development team, Durham County Council, Active Easington, Lawn Tennis Association and Tennis Foundation came together to see if a local after school club could be set up to help the youngsters continue their tennis development. Further partnership work with Coalfields Regeneration also brought additional resources and support for this exciting project!
Local Community Coach John Appleby and Ashleigh Baines (Level 1) were approached to get the project kick started and a plan of which schools to target was developed by Garry Purcell.
Jo Cunliffe (Tennis Development Manager) for the area went along on Feb 7 and was thrilled with what was happening,
"I really was taken aback by the amount of kids! They were clearly loving the coaching and learning new skills, whilst being with their buddies. This is really exciting for Seaham and the local community. This is down to all the people involved working hard to see opportunities like this happen and I'm sure John and the team have been thrilled to see this start off so well!"
Thanks must go to Durham County Council, Active Easington, Coalfield Regeneration, LTA and Tennis Foundation for supporting the project and seeing tennis grow in the area. Heres to plenty more smiles in Seaham in 2012 and on!