salts
tennis club
places for up to 100 children per year,
Free Tennis In the Parks which have
attracted an average of 25 attendees per
year, heavily subsidised winter indoor
coaching for junior members and a one
off programme “Fit as a Fiddle” for
senior citizens. Coach Richard Senior
runs all these programmes alongside
his normal club courses and also now
delivers coaching sessions to 2 Upper
schools one of which is a satellite club to
Salts T.C and to 12 other schools in the
local area.
With Salts clearly doing so much good
work, we caught up with Chairman
Jim Dyer to find out more. He told
us, “I have been involved with tennis
since 1974 and became a member of
Salts Tennis Club when my son started
playing for the teams - that would be
about 25 years ago, I quickly became
involved with the committee and have
served the club since.
2014 has been a steady year with the
teams doing reasonably well, the juniors
going from strength to strength and the
influx of new players who have taken
up out Introductory Offer which we feel
has been really successful as we retain
90% of players who have become full
members with the majority slotting into
the club atmosphere. The mood down
at the club is buoyant with most of the
members joining in with the internal
tournaments and social aspects of the
club.
Junior tennis is very important to us as
juniors are the way forward for the future
of British Tennis; we work closely with
primary and upper schools in the area
supplying in school extra curriculum
coaching and this has now grown from
1 upper school and 3 primaries in 2010
to 2 upper schools, 6 primary schools
and 3 Leaning Difficulty schools. Our
coach Richard Senior is fully committed
to extend these programmes wherever
possible.
With costs spiralling I think our biggest
challenge will be to keep the club
financially secure to enable us to keep the
upkeep of the courts at a high standard.
The clubs ambitions are to keep moving
steadily forward with our junior and
senior coaching opportunities and
expanding these whenever possible.”
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