Roger Draper, the Chief Executive of the UK Lawn Tennis Association, expressed his admiration for the work of tennis players and coaches in Scotland during a visit to Stirling’s Institute of Sport this week.

“It’s been really interesting for me. Some of the top young tennis players – from the Under 10s upwards – are coming out of Scotland. So something is being done well.”

Roger, who was in Scotland for the Davis Cup match at Braehead between the UK and Ukraine, took the opportunity to meet Judy Murray and other coaches to hear and see how development was continuing.

“There is a strong pipeline of talent coming through. At present, Scotland is leading the way in GB tennis and this is very heartening.”

“There are a lot to top juniors who started playing at four and five. If you look back at the Under 10 squad 12-14 years ago you had Andy and Jamie Murray, Jamie Baker and Colin Fleming.

“It’s all about high quality. It was about pushing through as a group of exceptional players and having five or six players working together and playing against each other to raise the level. They all help push each other to bigger and better things,” he says.

But Draper says there was commitment and determination not just from the players themselves, but from their coaches, carers and their parents.

Draper admits it has been tougher for the young tennis players in Scotland to succeed.  “At some stage they had to begin travelling south to increase their competition and play in England and further afield. This makes them all a little bit tougher. Because you’re having to travel more and spend more time thinking about preparation, it means you’ve got to be that bit more committed and determined. You wouldn’t want to keep going for long if you spent hours in a car just to end up thumped in the first round. If you want to develop as a winning sportsperson, you’ve got to have the commitment and support of your coaches and parents.”

Draper is delighted that British Tennis has landed a major sponsor to help develop his blueprint for tennis. The Dutch insurance and pension company, Aegon, which has large presence in Scotland as Aegon UK, has signed up for five years with a deal reckoned to be worth around £20 million. This will include sponsorship of all the major UK tennis events outside of Wimbledon.

“It’s a two-way relationship in that we can learn from Aegon about professionalism in business, while we can offer them help with looking at high performance and achieving more from their people.”

While the clamour is to have more British tennis players in the world Top 100 in both men and women’s tennis, this is easier said than done, with tennis played in many more countries, including in Russia and the former eastern bloc where there are hundreds of thousands of determined sporty, young people who see tennis as a platform for success in life.

Draper has regularly said that the UK’s young tennis players need more competitions to play in – and this is now happening. From Under 10s upwards, encouraging more UK players to take part is the challenge.

“You can have the best coaching in the world – but you also need players to earn their stripes in the heat of competition, where their temperament is properly forged,” he says.

But Draper is all too aware of the individual cost of bringing on this new elite generation. If tennis is to move away from being seen purely as a “middle class “ game, then it will need financial support to get into deprived urban areas with both tennis facilities and coaching.

“We’ve been taken aback by some of the costs of actually progressing through. Even for a seven year-old starting off on the performance journey,  it probably costs, £3-4,000 a year.  For a ten year old, it probably costs £8-10,000 a year,” he says.

If you’re a young star based in Scotland with travelling expenses that can be substantially more. So sponsorship such as the Aegon deal is gold-dust in helping to take British tennis to a higher plane.

“This gives us the confidence to attract more partners of the stature of Aegon, although we do accept that we are in an economic recession and that high level sponsorship is very hard to come by.”

But for Draper, tennis is much more than simply the elite. It’s about increasing participation.

“Our ambition is to grow the game. Tennis is a game for life – from three until 83, you can just play it for social reasons and for keeping fit, because it is a good cardio-vascular sport,” he says.

British Tennis now has the largest sports participation membership of any organisation in the UK, with 210,000 members. Draper’s ambition is to get that figure to 300,000 by the end of the year. It is incredible to think that the Law Tennis Association, which has the lure of Wimbledon tickets, hasn’t used its data base of players up until now. That’s all changing, says Draper, and the sponsorship deal with Aegon will help.

“We have 60,000 people playing once week and several hundred thousand playing once or twice a year. We need more people taking part and enjoying their tennis. That has spin-offs in terms of people becoming more involved with the game as players, officials or coaches, and it builds from there.”

Draper, who arrived at British Tennis three years ago after helping UK Sport in its bid for London 2012, is also excited by the future prospects.

“Of course we have Andy Murray, who is outstanding. And he is hugely important in terms of tennis’s major profile and the support with the British public.  But there is an international focus on the UK now, it’s more than simply the Wimbledon fortnight. For example, the end of year ATP Masters event is at the London 02 arena this year and the top 10 players will be battling it out. This will be fantastic.”

“We have Anne Keothavong in the Top 50 and more than 4.4 million viewers watched Laura Robson winning Junior Wimbledon. There is an appetite in the UK for watching great tennis.”

“And one of the great developments has been in wheelchair tennis. Our paralympic team is among the best in the world. We have Peter Norfolk, who is number world number one in the quad singles, and we’ve got Gordon Reid and Lucy Shuker, British No 1 and ranked tenth in the world. We now have a cohort of world-class wheelchair tennis players,” he adds.

So Draper feels tennis is in good hands – and as he heads towards Braehead and the David Cup rubber, he is hopeful that the UK squad, without and injured Andy Murray can rise to the occasion.

KK
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