First tennis venues gain LTA Youth recognition

Is hospitality missing a trick with employee engagement?

Four outstanding tennis venues across Great Britain have become the first LTA Youth Recognised Venues for adopting and delivering the junior programme to the highest standard.

LTA Youth was introduced in 2021 as a junior programme created to help more children enjoy the benefits of playing and staying in tennis, whatever their age, gender, ability, disability or background.

In June, the first four venues to achieve LTA Youth Recognised Venues were announced as Penarth Windsor Tennis Club, Nottingham Tennis Centre, the University of Bristol and Sunderland Tennis Centre.

Sam Richardson, Head of Tennis Products and Programmes at the LTA said: “We are so pleased to be recognising tennis venues for delivering outstanding junior programmes and committing to LTA Youth. The venues that have been awarded the status so far are examples of best practice and should be very proud of their achievement. These four venues have delivered on the programme’s five key principles and offer all five stages of the game – from blue through to yellow,” said Sam. “This, alongside adopting LTA Youth Competitions into their weekly programmes has meant that they have continued to grow and open the game up to new audiences in their areas.”

This recognition is expected to become a key tool which can help to promote their venues, attract more players and grow their clubs still further.

Ellie Lewis, coach at Tennis Squad for Penarth Windsor Tennis Club, said: It’s a game changer for us. We can use that to help promote the club and we’ve had a lot of feedback from Tennis Wales, our committee and other venues wanting to know how they can achieve it as well.

“We’re maxed out now and actually have waiting lists for the under 10 age group which I think say a lot about why we’ve become a recognised venue.

“Not only are we bringing them in but we’re retaining them as well, which is really important. Kids are having fun on court but they’re also developing at the same time.”

For Dave Everington, Tennis Manager at the Nottingham Tennis Centre, delivering the LTA programme is an honour, providing local players with the opportunity to play amazing tennis.

“The programme in Nottingham has continued to grow and is now one of the biggest in the country with nearly 1300 players weekly,” said Dave. “The challenge with that is keeping the standards high, but our attrition rates have improved so much since we’ve had the LTA Youth programme and are at the lowest they’ve ever been.”

At Sunderland Tennis Centre, working in a city where other sports tend to dominate, LTA Youth Schools have proved the key to growing into the thriving centre they are today.

“LTA Youth Schools have been a great tool for us,” said Tennis Manager Graham Fowler. “We work very closely with Sunderland’s three games schools’ organisers and took the idea to them.

They liked it and pushed it in schools across the city. We got into a lot of schools that had never played tennis and from that we had a load of kids coming to the centre and we’re going from strength to strength.”

A different challenge faced Jason Boon and the team at the University of Bristol, where they found themselves with a very healthy numbers of teenagers but struggling to engage the under eights.

“We ran an LTA Youth roadshow which brought in 600 kids and off the back of that 210 signed up for our follow up offer of six weeks and we’ve retained over 150 of them – almost triple what we had before!

“The programme is really thriving and now we can’t wait to have our next influx of kids.”

MORE INFORMATION

More details on the LTA scheme are available at www.lta.org.uk

Turf Assistant is proud to be a CMAE Partner

Turf Assistant is an industry-leading software for Course Managers. It gives them automated, accurate data so that they and their Clubs' stakeholders make decisions based on facts, not opinions.

Data-driven decision making plus 100% visibility makes Turf Assistant the choice of 400+ progressive General Managers.