News

Anne Keothavong opens Hackney Downs courts

Anne Keothavong, former British # 1, opened the new courts at Hackney Downs on October 4th 2011.

Anne is a former Hackney resident and started her playing career on the Hackney Downs courts. She attended Shacklewell Primary School and Kingsland Secondary School so she really enjoyed returning to her old stomping ground and conducting a workshop with children from local schools.

Pupils from the Bridge Academy, Mossbourne Academy, Betty Layward and Millfields Primary Schools attended the workshop. All of them train regularly on the HCTC programme either in schools squads, club squads or on the high performance programme.

Anne was very impressed with the standard of play and our players were inspired by meeting and playing with a local girl who has been ranked as high as 45 in the world. Some of them even managed to win a few points against her!

Cllr Jonathan McShane also attended.
Picture shows HCTC players with Anne and Cllr McShane.

Aegon Team successes

Hackney City Tennis had more teams playing in the Aegon Leagues this summer than any other club in Middlesex. 18 in total. Six of these teams won their respective leagues.

Mini Red ‘A’ - County Division 1
Mini Red ‘B’ - County Division 3
Mini Red ‘C’ - County Division 5
12u Boys ‘B’ - County Division 2
16u Girls - County Division 1
Mens II - County Division 5 East

We also had seven 2nd placings and four 3rd placings.

Well done to all the players and the team captains who made sure we could field strong teams and fufill all our fixtures.

Picture shows the winning Mini Red A Team with their team manager Jenny Shosholli.

Slazenger League success

Our Mens and Ladies teams also had tremendous success in the Middlesex Slazenger Summer leagues. All five teams, 3 Mens and 2 Ladies, were promoted at the end of the season and four of the teams actually won their division.

The teams are now training hard and competing in the Middlesex floodlit leagues. We have 3 Mens teams, 2 Ladies teams, 2 Mixed teams and 1 Vets team competing.

If you are interested in playing for the club please contact our Team Captains - Richard Boreham (Mens), Nila Banerjee (Ladies), Francesca Gray (Vets).
Visit the Teams & Fixtures page for information on playing for the club

Picture shows ladies at team training with coach David Parry.

Tennis Leaders Award

11 of our junior players recently completed the Tennis Leaders Award. This is the first step on the coaching ladder and is targeted at 14 – 16 year olds. They learnt how to improve their planning, organisation and communication skills as well as topics such as Media & Communication, Buddy Hitting and Competition Organisation. Most of them also assisted at the camps during the summer holidays and have completed their volunteering hours.

The players who took part were, Phillipa Taylor, Sam Joseph, Josh Joseph, Joe Mason, Charlie Offer, Matilda Taylor, Emily Wickham, Patrick Beal, Teklat Tesfit, Harriet Ayliffe, Alby Miller.

Three of our young members, Simone John-Baptiste, Jamie Caprice and Matilda Taylor have also passed their Level 1 Coaching Course and Alex Scally should complete the course next week.

Picture shows some of the players practising their communication skills.


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