As part of the Lawn Tennis Association’s (LTA) ambitious new ten year performance landscape for British tennis, Swansea Tennis Centre has been accredited as one of the 11 Regional Player Development Centres in Britain. The Swansea Tennis Academy, which is part of the Swansea Tennis Centre programme, has been achieving some outstanding results over the last few years and achieving this landmark from the LTA is a recognition of this. As a Regional Performance Centre, the Swansea Tennis Centre will receive additional support from the LTA to help develop players in the area who are at GB regional and national level, and also to further develop the base of young players in the region.
The Swansea Tennis Academy is led by Head Coach Craig Ingham and Fran Lewis and over the last few years the centre has produced a number of GB national and international level junior players, including 10 year old Mimi Xu who has recently won an international title in France and has been selected to represent Great Britain. Fran Lewis has been recognised as one of the outstanding young performance coaches in Britain with the LTA linking her in a support role to the Great Britain woman’s Fed Cup team and naming her as the Assistant Manager of the GB 14s girls team. Fran was named 2017 Tennis Wales Coach of the Year, and is currently one of three finalists for Coach of the Year at the British Tennis Awards held at Wimbledon in July. In response to the news about the Swansea Tennis Centre’s new performance status Fran said “The whole team at Swansea are incredibly proud of achieving Regional Player Development Centre Status but more importantly excited to start the journey in September. We have always been motivated by providing Welsh players with the best possible opportunities to progress onto national and international tennis and so this further enhances our ability to provide this service”.
Chief Executive of Tennis Wales, Peter Drew, added “This is fantastic news for Swansea Tennis Centre and for Welsh tennis. This will give the players in the region a great opportunity to be supported in their tennis journey, and it is really well deserved recognition for the great work of coaches and staff at the centre. Wales currently has the strongest group of junior tennis players that we’ve had for quite some time and we also have some of the best young performance coaches in Britain. So the news of the Swansea Tennis Centre is great to help build on this even more and is further evidence of the exciting era of performance tennis we currently have in Wales”.