Elthorne Tennis

As many of you will know, we have been successful with our planning application to redevelop the tennis court area in Elthorne Park.

This will include;

• Resurfacing the 3 existing tennis courts. Courts will be painted macadam as before.
• Supply of Electricity to Elthorne Park
• Floodlights to all courts
• Pathway Lighting for access after dark.
• Internet connected coded gate access. This will be interactive with your Clubspark account for bookings
• New Pavillion/Cafe sited on the grass area between the tennis courts and children's playground
• The Cafe will include a public toilet, accessible during cafe hours
• outdoor table and chair area

Update 17th June 2024

My update this time around will report on both our facility development and the programme development.

In our BIGGEST NEWS I’m really pleased to announce we will be holding our first Pickleball Event on Sunday 7th July at 2-5pm. £2.00 entry will get you access to play Pickleball all afternoon. If you haven’t seen or heard of Pickleball yet, be prepared to be blown away by the new sport craze taking the world by storm. With nearly 1 million players already in the United States, this new racquet sport is the thing to do. Very easy to pick up and play immediately, Pickleball allows inexperience to not be a barrier, anyone can play and enjoy.

On the day paddles and balls will be free to use, and there will be demonstrations of how to score and play matches.

If the event is a success expect there to be an event every month to respond to the demand !!

You can book into the Club Afternoon by going to the Coaching Tab on the website and searching for Pickleball or follow this link; Book for Pickleball

Facility Development

I’m very sorry to say the promise of a new café with a public toilet has failed to materialise during April and May of this year as previously scheduled. I’m disappointed myself and am keen to complete all stages of this redevelopment, including the new Café with toilet. As you may know this project has been a partnership between Ealing Council and myself and up until now the development has kept on track. The key Council employee, Nick Kalnakov, had to return to Bulgaria earlier in the year and it has put the brakes on the project. I have been unable to reach Chris Welsh, Head of Ealing Parks Division, to get any information about how to take the project further. I will report on any change in this position as soon as I have new information.

Floodlights

I am very pleased to report the full functionality of the floodlights that were installed last year. After the initial teething problems, all the courts can now be lit independently. This means floodlights are turned on from a person’s booking on the website and are turned off if the court is not booked. Each court can be individually lit so that light impact is kept to a minimum and excess energy is not wasted.

Access Lighting

The access lighting we have planned for the park so that people are able to walk safely to and from courts, is taking slightly longer than expected but is still continuing. We envisage this project being operational by the time the nights draw in for the winter. In the meantime, a set of lights directly outside the entry gate has been put up so that there is light directly outside the courts. These lights are on a timer each day 5.30-9.30pm.

Booking of Tennis Courts behind Elthorne High School

Further to the Pilot Scheme we have been running to enable tennis bookings on the MUGA’s, I’m pleased to be able to report the scheme will now continue to run officially. This will mean you will be able to book a MUGA tennis court on a Saturday and Sunday morning during the rest of this school term and then any day during the school holidays (from Thursday 25th July to Sunday 1st September 2024). From September 2024 we will be delivering LTA Sanctioned Tournaments on most weekends on the MUGAs. We will also be adding Friday nights to our weekly schedule of when MUGA courts can be booked from our website.

As some of you may know the courts are owned by Ealing Council and are used by the School for PE and Games sessions during school-time. At all other times the courts have been managed by the Sports Centre under Everyone Active. 

You will see the 4 courts shown on the Court Booking page on the website. The courts will be listed as MUGA 1, MUGA 2, MUGA 3 & MUGA 4 and in the first instance we will open bookings during the weekends. Bookings will be priced at the off-peak price - so £2.00 for members and £4.00 for public bookings.

Programme Development

Competition

The big announcement about the programme this time around is about how we’re trying to improve our competitions across the board.

I had such an amazing response from my message last month, asking if there was anyone interested in becoming involved with competitions, that we have been able to ask the LTA to run a Referees course just for our interested group. I hope to be able to report next time on how many people in our club have passed their Referees Qualification and are starting a new phase of their life delivering competitions, very exciting………..

We’ll be starting to put on different tournaments over the coming months, hopefully we’ll be able to use the newly qualified referees. Our first events will be specifically for our juniors who have not played tournaments before. Don’t worry, we’ll have something for everyone and I welcome suggestions and feedback about events to run.

New Ladies Team & Men’s Team

We will be entering both a new Ladies Team and a Men’s Team in the upcoming Middlesex LTA Winter County Leagues. The 2 teams will be placed into the lowest leagues to start their respective campaigns. During the winter league, each team fields 4 players for each fixture. Typically, there are 6 or 7 teams that are put in the same league. Our team will play all other teams through the winter period. There will be both a Men’s Weekly Practice session and a Ladies Weekly Practice session taking place, dates and timings to be finalised over the coming weeks. We will enter an expanded teams in the Middlesex LTA Summer Leagues next Summer.

New Junior Teams

In addition to the Adult Teams, we’ll be entering selected Junior teams into the County Leagues that will represent our club in the local county leagues, if you have a child who you think would like to play more competitively, please get in touch with Matthew on the usual contact.

New Box Leagues

As part of our club registration with the LTA, we are able to utilise the LTA’s competition resources, one of which is a Box League programme that will allow us to organise our members into leagues. Each League, once set up, contains players who will play matches against each other where results are submitted to the LTA through the Box League Programme. The results will affect each person’s WTN (World Tennis Number – the LTA’s new rating system) and each player will be able to monitor their results as time goes on. I’ve been busy importing members of Elthorne Tennis into the Box League Programme and I’m getting ready to send out notifications to everyone listed. Some of you will have had a notification from the LTA explaining your entry into the Elthorne Box League, anyone who has not received a message from the LTA but would like to be included in our first round of matches, please contact Matthew on matthew@cattaway.com or 07876221259. I am hoping to be able to post the first matches from the last week in June. All rules and information about the Box Leagues will be sent to players prior to the matches starting.

Starter tournaments for juniors and adults

Lots of our Junior Players in our Junior Coaching Programme are improving and I would like to encourage as many as possible to play competitively. As a result, we will be holding a number of Starter Tournament Events over the coming weeks for the various age groups and Adults, watch out for dates/times.

Adult Coaching Programme News

We have had a good response from the new Adult Beginner Courses that are about to start over the coming weeks, I appreciate I should probably have started offering Beginner courses before now. Rest assured we will offer regular 6 week courses from now on. The regular drop-in Adult Beginner Classes will continue to run on Wednesdays at 7pm and Saturdays at 9.30am.

There are still spaces for the Adult Improver 6 week Course, starting on Friday 28th June for those players who’d like a little bit more continuity in their coaching groups. Sign-up on website

Our LiveBall sessions are some of the most popular sessions we run through the week, they offer players a chance to practice under match conditions for extended periods of time, it is clear we have to get the schedule right for a class to be popular. I’ll be taking the LiveBall session on Tuesday off the schedule as it continues to be less popular.  Suggestions for a new session are warmly welcomed, please let Matthew know your thoughts !!

The Cardio Tennis session we introduced on Sunday mornings made a massive first impression for lots of people. Since then, we’ve struggled to run sessions as the number needed to make the session work is high, so we’ve faced having to cancel sessions. I’m going to take this session off our schedule and rethink when it might be best to run a session. Suggestions welcome !!

As mentioned earlier in this update, we will be starting a mid-week men’s team practice and a mid-week ladies team practice. I’m going to be proposing a Tuesday at 8pm for the Men’s Practice and Thursday at 8pm for the Ladies Team Practice. More information about the practices to follow shortly.

Junior Coaching Programme News

Please see an up-to-date list of Junior Coaching Groups on our Notice Board by the Entry Gate to the courts. The list will give info about time/coach/age group/numbers in group

Our Holiday Camps are now bookable on the website. We are running 1 & 2 hour camps for all age groups from the week of 22/7/2024.

The September to December Junior Groups are also bookable on the website. Remember it’s cheaper for the child to become a member of Elthorne Tennis when booking group courses. You’ll pay £11.20/hour if you are a member and £16.00/hour if a non-member. Membership is open to anyone for £11.00/year

Our Junior Group Coaching runs until Sunday 21st July so there’s still plenty of time for a child to join a class. Children joining classes after they start will only pay the cost of the classes left in the term.

Please contact Matthew on 07876221259, Francis on 07922210220 and Emre on 07449966455 if you have any further questions about coaching

I hope this update is good news for you all. This redevelopment signals a big improvement to tennis provision for our community, not to mention a brand new cafe facility for all park users.

Kind regards

Matthew Cattaway

07876221259

matthew@cattaway.com