Walking along the beach - The future
Since the start of lockdown things have been hard for everyone so I hope you are all keeping well in these difficult times and our thoughts are of course with everybody who has been affected by Coronavirus.
It’s May 2020 and I’m thinking about the future.
The biggest questions for me are pretty much the same as they always have been - what am I trying to achieve and how am I going to achieve it? There are so many different areas that I can see as possibilities and I’m just trying to figure out where to focus at the moment. Through that thought process I’ve found that one of the things I need to accept is that my impatience to make progress is my biggest weakness! The current situation is obviously completely unavoidable but frustrating to someone who is impatient to get going - but that is something I will have to learn to live with.
The Coronavirus has hit us hard, but it has also given the gift of time – time with my children, time to think, time to get back to walking on the beach and just coming to terms with everything. While walking along the beach next to my home in North Wales I think I have come up with a goal of getting 1000 new people playing Tennis in formal programs in North Wales. I have many great projects in the North of England which I have built up from scratch and am very proud of, but being brought up in North Wales does motivate me to make a difference in the area in a positive way.
With that in mind, my questions would be - do the people involved in North Wales Tennis remember me and how do they remember me, how will the current coaches in the area react, will I just be associated with developing better players as I used to or will people know that for my last 10 years I have been about developing successful mass participation programs and will those people new to Tennis give it a go with a new person back to the area? I think the answers to those questions will have to remain unknown for now. I am hopeful that the investment that I have made in myself to become level 5 qualified and the step to move out of area to get new perspectives along with the experience that I have gained from that will come through in the content and processes of the sessions that are offered.
In my 20’s I spent all my time trying to develop better Tennis players and I was successful – coaching National champions, taking International trips, organising summer tours, managing county players etc. Now that I am a bit older (and wiser?) I can see that developing another national champion would be fantastic but without more people playing the sport at a grass roots level that’s just not going to happen. I think that the way forward is to work with clubs, coaches and Tennis venues to deliver group coaching programs with the aim of widely increasing participation and hopefully following on from that trying to develop as many county players as I have done in the past - to date I have coached 31 county players in North Wales so that’s a goal to work to!
I’m currently working hard to prepare some offers to release to the market as soon as possible. I’m hopeful that people will give the sessions a go and take up Tennis even though the sport is in decline nationally. With that in mind - I would be really interested to hear from members of the public to get their view on starting a new sport, particularly Tennis, in the current climate and also from any coaches that want to collaborate to make a difference.