With the event due to start at 2pm, it wasn’t looking promising with about 10 minutes to go; dark skies, even a short hailstorm, but our luck was in. The rain stopped, families started to arrive and soon all the activities aimed at the youngest visitors were underway. We even had blue sky!

Some of the visitors had already taken part in their usual Saturday morning coaching session and were keen to play again. The activities were a mixture of basic ball skills and actual racquet skills. There were some seriously good young players.

The stars of the show were, as always, our Junior helpers who worked cheerfully throughout despite the fact that it remained decidedly chilly. As impressive as their manner of helping was their skill. It is not that easy to feed a ball just so for a very young child to have a chance of hitting it.

Our thanks to all the people who helped make the event a success!

Well done to everyone who won through to the Finals, especially to our winners. A few familiar faces keep repeating in the photos : Peter Grant winning 4 finals and Jane Vincent also winning 4. The full results are in a separate post. Look out too for the post of photos of our past members helping us celebrate 50 years at Ewshot Lane. Three of our Junior winners were honoured to be presented with their trophy by the original donors who had come as our guests : the Seymour trophy for the U12 girls, the Ryder trophy for the U12 boys and the Archer trophy for the U18 boys.

Please click on an image to see a slideshow of the photos at full size

We put on our first Mini Tennis Festival on March 25^th. It was well-advertised around local schools but we still had no idea how many families would come along. The event was described as starting at 1:30; by 1:45 our car park was full and our activities were well underway.

It was a wonderful couple of hours.  Lots of new faces, good weather, happy children. Just a lovely afternoon with so many youngsters (and parents!) enjoying themselves. There were some seriously good little players. How about the girl with the pink leggings and white cap? What style! Great preparation, eyes on the ball – don’t know if she hit it but it all looks good!

The clothes pegs were not a new fashion item, rather each one was the reward for success in an activity, proudly collected!

A big thank you to our coaching team, Kathy and Jamie, for organising, Zana for all the publicity, Jane and our young leaders for helping to run the activities, Debra for the delicious refreshments, Linda and Ken for car park safety and of course everybody who attended. Jamie in particular had a busy day : a full morning of coaching as usual, boundless enthusiasm during the afternoon and he still had the energy to vacuum the clubhouse when all our visitors had left.