Want to play a Tennis competition unsure where to start ?

I always love to see the progress of young up and coming Tennis players. I am currently supporting a few who are new to the sport. The biggest area that parents are asking me about now is how do we find Competitions and what is the right type of competition to play in?

The biggest challenge we are currently facing is the impact of the Coronavirus which has meant that many events have been cancelled or rescheduled. Obviously current times are pretty unprecedented so I’m going to address this question in a more general way than specifically relating to the Coronavirus challenges.

The first thing that I would advise is starting to compete as soon as you can. The sooner you start playing competitively the sooner you can start moving through the competition levels and advance your game and playing level. It’s best to start with a Club based Team Challenge event or friendly match close to home. These types of competitions are generally underestimated but are a great source of learning for all involved and a good way of getting used to the competitive environment in a low pressure, fun based way. I just wanted to add that the LTA Team challenge initiative is a great option to start competing and I think we need much more of these events on offer.

Once you have got the idea of competition rules and formats the next step is to look for a beginners competition further away from your local venue. I always recommend going to an event with new opponents at the Team challenge level before looking at the next level of grade 6 LTA sanctioned tournaments. I would always speak with a coach or competition official to get an idea of the level of the next tier of competition before attending and maybe even go and be a spectator at an event to get an idea of the day. I always advise parents at this stage to make the first official LTA sanctioned event a day out with a few other things going on to keep the competition in perspective. Try to play down the winning and losing and focus more on getting to know how other people play and what you enjoy in the competition. Once players and parents have the hang of these events the same process can be applied with the next tier of events up to grade 5 events and so on.

The LTA competition search tool will be needed when you start searching for sanctioned events - it isn’t perfect, but the link is here https://competitions.lta.org.uk/ . Try and refine your searches using the filters that you can find by clicking on Tournaments. I can only suggest that you have a play around with the filters and you will get the idea. You can also speak directly to officials and your coach and they can recommend some competitions to play.

I hope this has helped with some ideas about how to get started in competition if you are new to competing. Good luck!