Mildura Lawn Tennis Club coach BIlLL MADAFFERI is a former ATP player and has joined the Sunraysia Daily sports team to look at local tennis
I READ with interest Bill McDonald’s comments this week in the Sunraysia Daily.
I’ve only met Bill a couple of times, but he’s certainly an interesting character who is very passionate about the game of tennis.
What Bill spoke about isn’t far off the mark. Tennis at club level is under-funded and the flow-on effect is felt by junior players coming through the system.
Retention is the hardest thing in any sport and tennis is not immune to this.
For a whole variety of reasons, junior players leave the game in their late teens.
A lack of prizemoney at lower-level tournaments certainly doesn’t provide much incentive for players to keep going.
Bill is correct when he says Tennis Australia is not doing enough to help our next generation of professional players.
But my interest is not just about the elite level, it is getting kids into the game and keeping them in it.
You can’t just put all the blame on Tennis Australia and the state bodies.
They have their faults and there are certainly plenty of things which can be improved, but the model they have in place is good – it just needs some tweaking.
My biggest beef with Tennis Australia and Tennis Victoria is the under-utilisation of coaches, particularly in regional areas like Sunraysia.
Instead of paying for a Tennis Victoria coach to travel to Mildura or Swan Hill to run a weekend coaching program four times a year, why wouldn’t you save the money and have local coaches run these academies.
The Sunraysia Academy of Sport tennis program hasn’t run for a couple of years.
I understand a lot of why it hasn’t is because of the quality of coaching provided by Tennis Victoria and how the program was run.
How can a coach who knows nothing about the players improve their game in a couple of hours? It just doesn’t happen.
Sure they can pass on a few tips about fitness and maybe tweak a player’s grip a bit, but overall it is not going to make much difference to their game.
It is why a coach who is based in the region should be overseeing these programs.
In this region there is myself and another professional coach in Swan Hill who between us could run these programs easily and I’m sure a lot more successfully with better outcomes than what has happened in the past.
Use the money saved on not flying someone up from Melbourne and on meals and accommodation and put it back into helping local coaches who have a vested interest in growing the game and improving players.
It seems pretty simple to me and still sticks with what tennis officials are trying to do by building a pathway for talented junior players.
If you don’t have your best juniors wanting to be a part of programs like the one run by the Sunraysia Academy of Sport, how are you ever going to unearth the next great talent?
But it’s not even about finding the next champion, that’s a bonus if it happens. It’s about teaching kids how to play the game properly and ensuring they are challenged and learn what it takes to make the next step as player.
As a coach, I often see a young kid who I can tell straight away has a great game, but often gets overlooked at the trials for these academies because the coach running the program knows nothing about them and has only seen them hit a tennis ball for 10 minutes.
So, as I said, I agree to a certain extent with what McDonald is saying, but I also agree with some of things Tennis Australia are trying to do to improve the game.
I just think it needs to be a more inclusive process and we all need to work together – tennis coaches and officials – to improve the game and, at the end of the day, it is about getting more people playing the great game of tennis.
