Tips for Parents of Performance Players - Conor Twomey

This is the first article from our resident coach Conor Twomey.  

It's a very interesting read and if you want to leave any comments below for Conor or you want to ask him any questions you can email the blog and I will get them answered for you.

Thanks Conor.

Here are my 5 tips for any parent of a performance player from Cork / Munster.

1- Players mature physically / mentally / emotionally at different stages.  Their results and performances can change as they move up through the age groups.  Usually post puberty players begin to find their true level and with the right coach reach their potential.  Don't be too caught up in results up to under 14 as it all changes as they get bigger and stronger and emotionally mature.

2 - Good technique is great but not the be all and end all.  Style over function.  Games literacy is the one Criticism I would have of all our juniors at the moment.  Why?  Simply put our players just don't play enough matches and build up match experience.  The one thing that was constant from attending the national and world conference recently was how lots of the top players played loads of matches. Furthermore , they played all levels which gave them experience of playing different spins and tactics. Some kids do so much coaching that they don't have time to play ..... nuts.

3- Slightly related to the last point. Make sure the cognitive load is not too much for your child.  If they are told one thing on a Monday and another on a Wednesday and something else in a private on Thursday and then another coach again on Saturday or Sunday giving information has one outcome ... overload.  Keep it simple and relevant and hopefully everyone is working off a plan. LTDP is a good guide for parents and coaches.

4- Don't follow the crowd.  If you want to stand out and be different and excel.  Sometimes you have to travel a different path. This is not easy but can be very rewarding if the player has the talent /drive and you have the means / time.  Never before have options been so available to parents and players as now. Provincial squads, private squads, club squads, national squads, international academies.  If you look at the Munster players who won in Fitzwilliam this year,  they all travelled and developed their game in very different areas.  From Dundalk to Dublin to France.  The last 10 years have taught me that there is no one formula.  Success can be achieved in many ways.  Find the right road and you will reap the rewards.
NOTE OF CAUTION, time and time again I've seen very good players not achieve their potential because of the poor decisions made by parents who felt they were doing the best.  A bit more research and conversation and this can easily be avoided.

5- This, I feel is the most important.  Who is driving the whole thing?  If your child is not bugging you constantly to play games and go training and wanting to do more then he/she is not a performance player but a very good recreational player.  I've seen countless talented players not succeed because they liked tennis but didn't love it.  When I was young, the first thing I did in the morning was open the window to see if it was raining and if it was I'd be gutted, as that meant no tennis .  Ask yourself the same question and if your child is not gutted then accept performance is not the path.

Please read my article next month when I will address the 5 things we need to fix to improve the tennis experience for everyone in the province.

Conor Twomey

Level 2 Performance coach and Provincial coach of the year.

Winter Tennis - Are you ready for it?

Winter Tennis

Are you ready for it?

As everyone gets ready for the dreaded winter league, we all look for an extra edge.
Some will look to base layer clothing, others to new shoes for better grip but the one area that will have the biggest impact on your game is your strings.

As the weather gets colder and wetter, the ball doesn't warm up as much and won't travel as fast.  When it gets wet it becomes heavier.  Therefore your power level drops.

There are a few options to help combat this.

• Lower your tension
• Change to a thinner string
• Change to a different string set up.

Lower your tension:

If you are happy with your strings and the feel they give you then the obvious choice is to lower your tension.  This is will increase your power and increase the sweet spot, which in turn will help with the shock of hitting the wet ball.

Control isn't as much of an issue in the winter season.

Change to thinner string:

A second option to consider is to change to a thinner version of the string you are using.  Again the feel that you like won't change too much but the thinner string is more elastic and therefore will throw the ball back out faster, again helping to increase the power.

Change to a different string set up:

This can be done in a few ways.  For one those players playing with a full bed of polyester string, winter tennis can affect your game the most.  Your strings aren't the most powerful to start with and also create the most shock and vibration, so playing in cold wet weather this shock and vibration becomes amplified and the lack of power from the strings is now greater.

You have the 2 options above that will help but also changing your string set up will help.

To keep some of the feel of your polyester string you could consider a hybrid set up (polyester and multifilament/nylon) or if you really wanted to up the power level you could choose a multifilament or nylon set up.

By choosing the hybrid you get the best of both worlds.  You get the control of the polyester and the power of the softer string.  There are a few options within hybrid set up and there is also tension to consider.  Speak to your racket stringer about these, or if you want to contact me directly (rob@racketrestringing.ie) I will be delighted to help you.

By choosing the full bed of Multifilament or Nylon the first thing you will do is really reduce the shock and vibration levels.  Bare in mind, not only are the conditions cold and, possibly, wet but your body is also cold and therefore more susceptible to shock on impact.

The softer string offers a larger sweet spot which makes your racket more forgiving and more powerful.

For me this is the first thing you should be looking at if you are playing winter league, the fancy hat or long-johns can be sorted then.

Enjoy our matches, i know I will.  

Winter tennis in Qatar (20-30')

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Cork Tennis Blog resident tennis Coach

Cork Tennis Blog would like to welcome Conor Twomey as our resident tennis coach.  Conor will be supplying articles to the blog and will also answer any of your questions.

I would like to thank Conor and look forward to reading his first article.

Conor, along with Kevin Murray, is also responsible for some serious footwork videos under the name Coaching Movement.  Currently these are available on one of Ireland's leading tennis websites, (www.robcherrytennis.com).  Thanks to Rob you can now link to these videos here.

"My name is Conor Twomey and I am presently Head coach of Bishopstown junior tennis academy and co/ founder of coachingmovement. 

Along with my colleague Mick Hurley we run the 'On the rise' high performance squads which provide high performance coaching to some of the best players in the province. 

I have also been awarded the provincial coach of the year for 2017 by Tennís coach Ireland as voted for by my peers. 

My qualifications are as follows,
Tennís Ireland level 1 and level 2 performance coach
PTR Qualified instructor
SAQ trainer
Qualified Director of Tennis with Tennís Ireland
Dip UCC youth work
Skills acquisition specialist.

I am delighted to have been asked to become the resident tennis expert for the CORK TENNIS BLOG, I hope that I can help everyone in Tennis when it comes to improving your game. 

Please watch this space as my first article will be of interest to all parents of aspiring Tennís athletes".

Conor Twomey

Tennis Workshop coming to Lower Aghada TC

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So Even if You Have No Partner, this Course will help you get a BETTER One in The Future.

48 HOURS To CLOSING.

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Junior Interprovincial Captain Required!

Its been a while!!

Well its been a while since I lasted posted something in here, so apologies about that.  It is difficult to keep up to date with what's happening at home on the tennis scene but thankfully this year I am getting to play more tennis.

With an amazing tennis facility here in Doha, 19 hard courts, 10 mini/midi courts,  it was surprisingly difficult to find people to play against.  There is no club structure like we are used to, so it wasn't a matter of joining a club and meeting people.
Shortly after we arrived there was one of the big local tournaments on.  This is sponsored by the QTF (Qatar Tennis Federation) and a big hotel here called The Intercontinental.  Really good prizes, so the best players the country has to offer were playing.  The standard was good, I would say on a par with the big events in Dublin.

Here I met a Spanish coach, who works for the QTF.  He was a former ATP tour player and he filled me in on how things worked out here.  I got to play him once at a different venue but because he works for the QTF he cannot play with anyone other than another coach at their facility, so I spent the next few months trying to organise games and not really finding people of a decent standard.

I did play in a very well organised event, run by the Filipinos.  It is a team event, which takes place every Friday night for 2 months.  There is a very big Filipino community in Qatar and they set up teams based on the area they live in.  It's taken very serious.  Each team is only allowed one non Filipino and I was it.
Played some very good matches and really enjoyed it and I was asked to play again this year.  So I am now an honorary member of the Filipino league.
The standard in the league can be varied, but the standard of the Filipino players here is quite good.  Most of their top players come here to coach.  The guy in this picture with the glasses, no not me! he was ranked as high as 5 in the Philippines and has some amazing touches.

While there is a very big tennis community in Qatar there is no structure to it.  The federation here only runs things for Qatari's apart from maybe 4 open tournaments in the year.  Trying to find out when these are on is the best kept secret in the Middle East.

If you want to get your racket strung here you can go to one of the big sports stores and wait 4 days for the privilege.  There are some individuals stringing but the quality of work isn't great and the strings are cheap imports.

So after going home for the summer to Cork I decided to bring back my own machine this time around.  I have now set up my own stringing room on the third floor of our house and happy to say I am very busy.

I now work with the brand Kirschbaum, as their official stringer for the Middle East and have a large selection of their strings to offer.

On arriving back in Doha in September I was contacted by a few other players about playing some matches.  Between my contacts and their contacts I set up a singles league which we call The Doha International Tennis League (DITL).  It really is international with players from South Africa, France, Spain, Pakistan, Turkey and more.  This went off very well and we are now a couple of weeks into DITL 2 where we have added another 8 players and increased the standard.  This has definitely helped with getting some more matches and also helped with my stringing :)

During my time in Cork during the summer I decided to upgrade my stringing skills and so I went to England to do 2 exams with the 2 largest stringing associations, the US Racket Stringers Associations (USRSA) and the European Racket Stringers Associations (ERSA).  They have a level called Pro Stringer or the next level up which is a Master Racket Technician (MRT).  I'm happy to say I qualified as an MRT with both organisations.  

Stringing really has become a passion/obsession of mine and the more I learn about it, the more I realise how an important part of the game it is and how important it is to give the right advice.

There are plenty of people around the world who string rackets but a very small percentage do it properly.

At the end of this month I head to Dusseldorf for the European Symposium and no doubt I will learn a lot more here from some of the best stringers in the World.  A lot of the guys here string at the Grand Slam events, maybe someday!

So all in all Qatar hasn't been a bad move. and to top it all off they host an ATP and WTA event every year with some of the best players in the world in attendance.  Last years final was between Djokovic and Nadal, this year Djokovic and Murray, how bad!

I would like to keep this blog as active as I can so if anyone has news, information on anything tennis related in Cork please feel free to contact me.

Thank you and see you all in the summer.

Understanding Polyester Strings!

Understanding Polyester Strings

 

The arrival of polyester strings has been one of the major developments in tennis in recent years.  It took a while for all professionals to change over from natural gut, but now nearly every professional player uses polyester in their string setup.
This may be as a full bed of polyester or in hybrid with natural gut.

To a professional player, a person who is training everyday and who hits the ball with incredible power, the benefit of polyester has been increased control and greater potential for spin.  It has helped bring their game to a new level.

For the club/social player the benefits are not the same.  The majority of club players do not understand how polyester performs and are generally using it for the wrong reason or through bad advice or lack of advice.

Polyester strings are advertised and sold as a string that gives you more control, more spin and excellent durability.  All of these things are true, if the player is capable of playing at the level required to achieve these benefits.

What we don't hear, too often, is that polyester is powerless, that you are more prone to injury, that it can be expensive and that its performance level (loss of tension) drops the quickest of all strings.

I definitely see the benefit of polyester, but what this piece is about is to help players 'Understand Polyester'.  To weigh up the Pro's and Con's of the string and then decide if it is the best choice for you or not!

Here are some points to consider:

• Why do the pro's use it?
• How does it perform?
• What happens at impact and afterwards?
• Durability versus Playability

To read the full article follow this link:

http://www.racketrestringing.ie/blog/understanding-polyester-strings

Signs of Overtraining by Helen Curtis

"Helen (Curtis) is a freelance writer specialising in healthcare, nutrition and fitness. After starting a family Helen decided to leave her job in the health sector and embark on a career in writing, something that she'd always been passionate about."

Signs Of Overtraining

Let’s be fair, now. The majority of us can’t really be accused of ‘overtraining’. We do our best, and we do very well, but often we’re forcing ourselves to exercise rather than forcing ourselves not to. The concept of ‘overtraining’, therefore, may seem like a strange one. Surely more is better? Well, not always. It all depends upon your attitude, and upon how much importance you afford the concept of resting in training. Overtraining can actually be very bad indeed for you. It can wear down your muscles, stress you out, make you obsessive, wreck your sporting form, and even make you fat. Sounds counter-intuitive, right? But it’s true. If you don’t give your body time to process and work through the exercise you’ve done, all that happens is that you stress your body out and wear it down without ever feeling the benefit. Overtraining is a bad thing. Many of us, however, don’t know we’re doing it. Here are some signs of overtraining to watch out for:

Obsession

One of the strongest signs of overtraining is not physical, but psychological. Nobody is quite sure if obsession prefigures overtraining or vice versa. Over-exercising causes cortisol to be released, which makes us stressed, which could bring on exercise-related anxieties in a kind of vicious circle. On the other hand, those kinds of anxieties could have brought on the over-exercising in the first place. Whatever the cause, many people who over-exercise display obsessive behaviour around their training. They train compulsively, and get very anxious indeed when they find themselves unable to exercise. Some experts speak of ‘exercise addiction’. The validity of this term is debated, but it is notable that some overtrainers let exercise take over their lives to the extent that it’s damaging things like their relationships, their careers, and their mental health. If you find yourself worrying unduly when you can’t exercise, or notice that friends and family are commenting on the amount of time you spend training, it’s perhaps time to take stock of your attitude towards training and exercise.

Muscle Weakness

You’d think that working out would make you stronger, and improve your muscle tone. If you do too much of it, however, you can actually end up making your muscles weaker. When we exercise, we cause micro-tears in our muscles. These are later fixed by the body, which adds more muscle tissue on in order to prevent the same thing from happening again. This is how our muscles grow. However, this process generally occurs while we are asleep or resting. If you don’t give your body enough time to rest and repair the damage, all that happens is that you pile micro-tear on micro-tear, and ultimately degrade your muscles. It’s not ideal.

Fatigue

Fairly obviously, if you don’t allow yourself enough rest time, you’re going to be exhausted. Physical and mental fatigue are strong signs of overtraining. Often, we put this down to stress and time pressures elsewhere in our lives - but if you are finding yourself constantly tired, try taking a day off training and see how you feel afterwards.

Frequent Minor Illness

You’re supposedly making yourself stronger with frequent training sessions, yet you’re constantly coming down with colds and infections. What’s going on? Basically, you’re wearing your body out, leaving it less energy and resources to devote to your immune system. If you overtrain, your body has to work flat-out to try and keep your muscles going. Ultimately, it ends up diverting resources from your organs and your other systems into your muscles to try to fulfil the demands you’re putting on your body. If you prolong this over a long period of time, your immune system ends up getting depleted, which means that you end up getting sick more often.

Tremors

The damage to your muscles and your general depleted state can manifest in tremors. We’ve all experienced minor tremors after a tough training session. If you find these persisting throughout your daily life, it’s probably time to start interspersing some rest with your training. Resting and recovering is just as important an aspect of your training regime as practising serves and strengthening your muscles. Without rest and recovery, all of your hard work might as well be for nothing!

Here's some advice for parents!

There seems to be a big focus on parents involvement in their childrens' sports lately, and unfortunately it's not all positive.

I came across this video recently, and while it is based on tennis the same principles can apply to any sport.

A note to sports parents!

New Racket Restringing blog

Racket restringing is probably the most overlooked part of anyone's equipment.  

Players spend a lot of time researching a new racket to find the ideal one, they change their grips often (sometimes forced to because of weather), buy the latest clothing, update their shoes when they find themselves slipping but a lot of the time overlook the importance of new strings.

When I started out playing the mentality was strings should last at the very least a year, but as times change and research improves we find that leaving your racket too long between stringing can really affect your performance level.

There are so many reasons to restring and so many things to know about restringing, such as:

• Tension 
• String construction
• String thickness
• Hybrid stringing

And much more.  Below is a link to a blog that covers all aspects of stringing, that will hopefully help you when choosing your next strings and convince the non-regular stringers that it will be worth their while to string more often.

http://www.racketrestringing.ie/blog

Tennis Ireland Workshops

Invitation to Tennis Ireland Participation & Club Development Provincial Workshop at the Firgrove Hotel, Mitchelstown, Co.Cork April 28th @7.00pm

“More Players, more Income, More Fun”

The Tennis Ireland Participation & Club Development Strategic Objective is to:-
Assist Clubs to increase membership by 20% by 2020, creating an extra €2.4m through additional subscriptions.

This includes;

• Extra 12k players average sub €200 = €2.4m Clubs plus extra income for coaches-€600k
• At the recent workshop at DCU in February 2016 60 delegates from across Ireland attended and this was a good start to the engagement process. 
• All Branch, Club Committee, Coach, Development Officer, Tournament Officials and Parks Tennis Officials are now invited to come along to the Tennis Ireland Participation & Club Development Provincial workshops.
• Everyone is welcome as we seek to engage, exchange information and gain ideas to help Clubs develop Tennis.

The Programme for Provincial Workshops is as follows;

• Leinster- Thursday 21^st April 2016 at DCU
• Munster - Thursday 28^th April 2016 at Mitchelstown
• Connacht- Thursday 5^th May 2016 at Castlebar
• Ulster -Thursday 12^th May 2016 at the House of Sport, Belfast

Registration is at 6.30pm and workshops starts at 7pm, continuing to 10pm

The Provincial Workshop Agenda is as follows;

1. Introduction & draft Tennis Ireland Participation & Club Development Plan & case study and key enablers for implementation- 40 mins & EB’s Club Checklist + questions 20 mins- total 60 minutes- George Lucas – Targets and sample Club Development Plan in Province of meeting RDO’s.
2. Secondary Schools Tennis Initiative- Olwyn O’Toole - 15 mins & questions 10 mins – total 25 mins
3. Club Development a coaches’ perspective- Liam Cassidy - 30 mins + questions 10 mins- total 40 mins.
4. Child Protection- Roger Geraghty - 10 mins + questions 5 mins- total- 15 mins.
5. Tournaments/Competitions/TI PIN/ITN/Software- Maria Kilkelly– 15 mins + questions 5 mins- total 20 mins.
6. Feedback and general discussion- 25 mins.
   
   

If you would like to attend please forward your name and email address to Lauren Smythe at laurensmythe@ulstertennis.co.uk by 4pm on the Monday before the relevant Provincial workshop. 

Many thanks.

Eugene Bergin/Robert Cummins/Billy O’Reilly/ /Roger Geraghty/Lauren Smythe/Garrett Barry/Conor O’Callaghan/Peter Farrell/Brendan Moran/George Lucas

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New Appointments for Munster Tennis

Munster branch is delighted to announce the appointments of our new Munster junior performance Officers. 

Cian Blake, Conor Twomey and Sinead Dunne have been selected to the roles to take Munster junior tennis forward over the next number of years.  Munster will now have three junior performance officers bringing a wealth of experience working throughout the province. 

We felt given the geographical size of the province that this will be the correct move for the province.
We would like to extend our thanks to all the other applicants and hope that all clubs, coaches and parents will embrace and support our new team over the coming weeks and months.

Coaching Movement

Coaching Movement is a Cork based sports specialist company.  It was launched in August 2014 and specialises in Skill and Athletic Development.

Their motto is simple "MOVE BETTER PLAY BETTER".

Coaching movement is run by Conor Twomey and Kevin Murray.
Conor is a TICA Level 2 Performance Coach as well a SAQ qualified coach, while Kevin has a B.A. in Strength and Conditioning.

They are available to hold workshops nationwide and can be reached on 087-1238585 or at coaching movement@gmail.com.

They have a very active and informative Facebook page (https://web.facebook.com/coachingmovement1/timeline) where you will find hundreds of instructional videos for you to try.

Definitely a page to checkout and if you are serious about your sport you won't waste time.

Qatar Futures Series

The Qatar Tennis Federation (QTF) hosts 6 ITF Futures events every year and 2 junior ITF events.
The senior events are run over two, three week periods.  The first series is run early in the year, March/April time and the second series takes place in November/December.

This year I was one of the stringers at the second series, my first professional gig, and I learned a lot from it.

Here's a few interesting facts from the events:

• Wilsons' Blade 98 range and Heads' Prestige range were the most used rackets.
• Luxilon Alu Power 130/16 was the most used string
• The most used string gauge was 130/16
• Tensions used ranged from 18 kilos to 27 kilos.

This series of events attracted players from all over the world, which was enjoyable as it provided an insight into how other nationalities value stringing.
A lot of the players stayed for either two or three weeks.  This would help them out a lot financially as they would be able to eliminate travel costs for this couple of weeks, which no doubt builds up over the course of the year.

The good thing for us, the stringers, is that it lets you become familiar with each player and what their preferences and expectations are from you.

A player who is tuned into the importance of stringing will ask for/do the following:

• Ask for the same machine for all his stringing jobs (consistency of tension)
• Ask for the same stringer (consistency of work)
• Look at changing tensions during the week (morning or night match, different temperatures)
• Ask for the rackets strung the night before or the day of the match.
• Have a racket or two strung at different tensions to give them various options during a match.

I have to admit it was surprising how few requests we received for any of the above.  It would make you wonder, even at professional level, do players pay enough attention to their strings.

Here's the interesting thing though, out of the 4 finalists (there was 6 finalists but seen as 2 players made the finals on 2 of the weeks, I say 4 finalists) 3 of them were the ones who paid most attention to their stringing.  They were the ones who made the various requests.
Is this a coincidence? I don't think so!

From a personal point of view I had some new experiences too.
One player wanted his knots to be done in the same holes all the time, probably a superstition.  That was no problem, just meant you had to watch where you started.
I also got to string with Natural Gut for the first time.  Not a big deal to a lot of stringers, but coming from Ireland where our weather isn't conducive to natural gut, it was an interesting experience.  I have read about stringing with gut a few times and that it requires extra attention in how it's handled and how it's fed through the stringbed.
More often than not it would be used as the crosses in a hybrid stringing pattern, this time however it was to be used as the mains.  This made the handling side of it easier but it did mean when weaving the cross strings you would have to be more careful so as to prevent notching the string.
Thankfully all went well and I ended up doing quite a few more over the course of the 3 weeks.

My most interesting job of the few weeks was very similar to the natural gut one above, ie. gut in the mains and polyester in the crosses.  The pattern was 16 x 19, here's where it got interesting though.  This player wanted 14 of the mains done using gut and the outer 2 mains done using polyester, all the polyester (crosses and mains) had to be part of the same string.
I'm not sure what was the reason for this, so I asked a stringers group that I am part of.  This group contains Grand Slam stringers, some of which are in Australia currently as part of the Australian Open Stringing Team.
No one could come up with a beneficial reason as to why you would string this way.  Some of the suggestions were, to save cost on stringing (you could get 3 sets of mains out of a 12m set instead of the normal 2), possibly stringbed stiffness (this would need to be checked), cosmetic was another suggestion and finally to make him feel important :).  Unless the stringbed stiffness turns out to be the case (which I will test and get back to you about) it does look as though it has no real benefit to his game.

So all in all I had a very enjoyable few weeks and look forward to my next tournament, wherever that might be!

Cork tennis arrives in Qatar!

Well my family and I are here just over a month now and I must say the tennis scene is very impressive here.

While Qatar wouldn't be a major player in world tennis, the facilities are second to none.  The QTF (Qatar Tennis Federation) bases itself in the capital of Qatar, Doha at its main stadium, Khalifa International Tennis and Squash Complex.
The centre has 21 courts and seem to be always in use.  On arriving I found that, had I brought my rackets with me, I could have entered the 8th QTF and Intercontinental Open.  This is an open tournament where the prize fund is 40,000 riyals plus membership to the exclusive Intercontinental hotel.  I have being over and back to watch it regularly and there are some very good players in the area.

This event is going to be followed up with 3 ITF Futures events running from the 28th of November to the 19th of December.  This promises to provide 3 very entertaining weeks of professional tennis.

These events will be followed, early in the new year, with 2 professional events.  There is an ATP event in January which always attracts the likes of Djokovic, Nadal and co.  This event will be followed in February with the arrival of the women.  The WTA event also attracts a top quality field.  Last years final was contested by Safrova and Azarenka.  So to say I'm looking forward to the coming months is a bit of an understatement.

I am also looking forward to my rackets arriving so I can start playing again.  The surface here is hard court, a surface I grew up on but I haven't played on it in a longtime so that will take a bit of getting used to.

Senior Interprovincial Champions 2015

Firstly I would like to apologise for not acknowledging this achievement earlier.  It's being a busy few months relocating to Qatar.

Huge Congratulations to Cian and his team.

I have played with and against Cian in the past so on hearing of his appointment to the position of Captain, I knew the team were in good hands.

Looking at the team, it had a good mix of experience and youth and this bodes well for the future.  Winning an Interpro is never an easy achievement so again I would just like to say congratulations to all in involved and let's hope this is the start of a run.

Cork Parks Tennis near you.

A note on the Cork Parks Tennis provided by Munster Regional Development Officer, Conor O Callaghan:

Hi All,

With the summer period in full swing I am sure you are looking to see what to do with the kids !!! As many of you will be aware not all children are inclined to enter the junior opens which are running through out the summer period. However if they are looking for some competition you can find all of the junior Open dates and entries at the following link: http://ti.tournamentsoftware.com/

However if your children are just looking to have some fun in a structured environment then there are many camps currently up and running that may be of interest to you. Parks Tennis programmes are not too far from you. The parks tennis programmes have been up and running for 36 years and are operational in a number of venues through out the province. Please visit the website : http://www.parkstennis.com/

This is a great and friendly way to introduce children into tennis and it has been the building blocks for players all over the country for a number of years.

If you are looking to see the nearest parks programme to you please visit the following links:

CORK:

http://www.parkstennis.com/munster-locations/cork/

Memorable Moments in Tennis provided by FBD Insurance.

The Most Memorable Moments in Tennis History

Since tennis first arrived on the sporting scene back in the late 1800s, there have been a wide array of memorable moments. Many of them will continue to be iconic moments that inspired a sporting generation, or created glorious memories for thoughts who witnessed them. It's difficult to make a small definitive list of the most memorable moments in the history of tennis, but here are just a few that will no doubt remain in people's minds for years to come.

First Ever Wimbledon Tournament in 1877

Wimbledon made its first appearance in 1877 with 22 male players competing for the inaugural championship. Spencer Gore became the first winner after a relatively straightforward 6-1 6-2 6-4 win in the final. Gore said that he thought the game of tennis was boring and decided to quit the game after losing his title defence the following year.

Ted Shroeder Winning Wimbledon 1949

American Ted Shroeder became known as 'Lucky Ted' after this championship and it is not hard to see why. He fought back in his first round match from two sets down to progress, and then followed that with a lucky miss-hit winner in the quarter finals. If that wasn't enough, his semi-final and final match all went to five sets. Remarkably, this was the only Wimbledon championship that Ted Shroeder competed in.

Arthur Ashe Winning Wimbledon 1975

Arthur Ashe made history in 1975 by becoming the first male African-American player to win at Wimbledon. He did so after beating Jimmy Connors in the final. It looked like Ashe was going to run away with it when he won the first two sets 6-1 6-1, but Connors fought back and forced a fourth set, where Ashe went on to make history.

Monica Seles Vs. Steffi Graf at French Open Final 1992

This truly was a clash of the titans game and it showed from start to finish. Even when it looked like Seles was about to take the title in the deciding set, Graff fought off four straight match points to keep the game going. Despite her strength, Graff eventually was worn down as she gave up the final set on an unforced error. It was a game that became an example for women's tennis, proving they could be just as athletic and as determined as the male players.

John Isner Vs. Nicholas Mahut at Wimbledon 2010

Even though this was only a first round game, the clash between John Isner and Nicholas Mahut become one of the longest and most infamous tennis games in history. Playing on court for a massive 11 hours and five minutes over the course of three days, Isner finally won the tie-break in the deciding set 70-68. It attracting the attention of the entire world and made news headlines everywhere. Never has a match in the first round of a tournament become so infamous.

Andy Murray Winning Wimbledon 2013

After nearly 80 years since the last British winner of Wimbledon, the wait was finally over when Andy Murray defeated Novak Djokovic in the final. Despite winning the first two sets in the sweltering heat at SW19, Djokovic fought back and forced Murray to play another difficult set before the Scotsman won the title. Nothing will have inspired a generation more than watching Murray make history in the manner that he did.

Here's a link to the very impressive Timeline, enjoy