Men’s Captain Coaching and Junior reports
MOOR PARK LAWN TENNIS CLUB
2019 AGM – Men’s Captain, Coaching and Junior reports
Men’s’ Captain Report
This year, as a committee, we decided to develop our junior, student and university players and introduce them into our adult men’s teams. We wanted to help develop their doubles play and give them the opportunity to become better all-round players and provide more depth to our adult teams. At the time of this decision, we knew it would have an effect on some of our team’s positions within the leagues but felt, in the long term, it would benefit Moor Park. Whilst we have some talented adult male players, as a club, we do not have a great depth of performance adult players. We felt by developing our junior, student and university players this will help to create some depth and hopefully attract more adult male members into the club.
The men’s first team are currently in 5th place in the Championship League. They have played 5 matches and won 2. We have our last match against Barnet on 1st September and I would like to wish the team all the very best for this match.
The men’s hot rackets team are in division 2B, have played 3 matches and have lost 3 with 4 to play. The mixed team played in the Watford and District League Division 3. They have completed 11 matches and have won 6 points. They will go down to Division 4 next year.
As you can imagine, with matches every week the amount of organisation, phone calls, text messages and WhatApp’s have been colossal and I must thank Anjan for helping me throughout the summer with the hundreds of calls and texts we have made to ensure we have a team for each match.
Coaching Report
Continuing on the success of our coaching programme last year, we have again further increased activities in our programme. We are now offering more groups and classes for both our adult and junior members.
I have recruited Ollie Webb, a LTA Level 2 coach to join our coaching team. Ollie will continue to develop our coaching programme over the forthcoming year from beginner to performance level. Ollie has settled well into the club and he has enjoyed and committed time to play in our 1st team.
Pierre has continued taking adult groups during the week and I have coached the majority of individual lessons during the week and weekends.
Anjan has been running a combination of social and team group coaching midweek, which has proved very popular.
We try very hard to increase Adult and Junior memberships during the year and the coaches delivered another comprehensive coaching and membership open day. This led to new memberships being taken out. We continue to offer free group lessons to perspective members.
I introduced competitive box leagues earlier in the year to increase match participation at the club. They were well received and we will commence the box leagues again in October.
Junior Report
Overall all our junior players have made good progress and some performance players have gone to the top national level, and also four of them have been selected to play for the county.
This year we have seen a number of new junior members join the club and more coaching programmes have been offered on a regular basis to promote mini players and junior players. We also continue promoting performance players from Under 10 to Under 21. We are in a stronger position this year as we now have players of all abilities.
We ran training junior squads throughout the year:
Mondays – squad (all abilities) 3.30 – 4.30 (Merchant Taylors School)
Tuesday – performance squad 3.30 – 4.30 (Merchant Taylors School)
Fridays – performance squad 5 – 8 pm
Saturdays – mini and beginners squad 12 – 1.30pm
Sundays – older performance squad 3 – 5 pm
We are also running junior group sessions throughout the week on demand. Many players have individual lessons over and above the squad training. We continue strong links with local schools such as Merchant Taylors, St Helen’s and Holy Trinity Primary School.
This year we entered 7 teams in different age groups in the Hertfordshire League from Under 10 to Under 16 for both boys and girls. All players performed extremely well. We need to thank all the parents who took the responsibility to be team captains and provided transport for away matches and refreshments for home matches. Without their support we would not be able to run the teams. The following results were achieved:
Under 10 mixed – 4th
Under 12 boys – 4th
Under 12 girls – 4th
Under 14 boys – 2nd
Under 14 girls – 1st
Under 16 boys – 3rd
Under 16 girls – 2nd
Most of our performance juniors play for the men’s and ladies’ teams which was our main focus for this year and overall their performance was outstanding. Both Anjan and I are tough and we instil strong discipline, all players know we have a strong ethos of hard work and achievement but we know how to produce outstanding players. Life’s no rehearsal so if you want to perform you have to understand that potential minus interference creates performance.
We get many clubs telling us how well our juniors play – no surprise there but the number of captains that say how well our juniors behave is a true reflection on these players.
The junior section at Moor Park LTC is growing monthly and is in a strong position especially in comparison to other local clubs. We also encourage older players, who are more able, to mentor and help with the coaching of younger players and thereby engender a community spirit. We are very fortunate to benefit from a great deal of support and engagement from the parents, which certainly helps the section to thrive.
The juniors represent the club in matches both in the junior leagues and adult leagues. These juniors are coming through because of the sound infrastructure of junior development at the club
All the coaches and Kamlesh have again been fantastic driving the junior section forward committing much times at weekends, organising matches, teas and socials so a massive thanks to them.
The junior coaching programme has continued to strengthen the general standard of play at the club and it was great to see many juniors participating in our club tournament this year. Many thanks to all the committee for making finals day such a great day but particularly Anjan and our junior parents for making this event so successful.
At this point, I would personally like to thank all the committee members, coaches, parents and helpers for their commitment and professionalism during the past year and I look forward to another successful year.
If anyone has any questions please do not hesitate to email or speak to me at your convenience.
Thank you
Nigel Buckman 31st August 2019