A tennis camp for persons 18 years and older got underway on Saturday at the National park Courts.
The camp has been scheduled by the Guyana Tennis Coaches Association (GTCA) in conjunction with the Guyana Lawn Tennis Association (GLTA) and will continue next weekend.
GLTA Public Relations Officer (PRO) Sandeep Chand said that the GLTA spent the main part of last year focusing on developing junior talent adding that the time had come to start targeting the older age groups.
“We’ve been successful at developing the junior talent now we want to try and capture the adults into the sport.
“We want to introduce as many persons as possible to the sport of tennis and also to give exposure to beginners to accredited ITF coaches so that they can further improve their skills through structured drills,” Chand told Stabroek Sport.
“The camp will run over the next two weekends and there will be similar camps scheduled during the course of the year.
“Persons coming out from the camp can continue training with GTCA affiliated coaches.”
This will be the first project of the GTCA that is being headed by chairman, Andre Lopes and includes Level Two Certified ITF (International Tennis Federation) coach Ezra Sue-Ho.
Founded last month, the GTCA is a committee of tennis coaches tasked with the development of tennis coaching who are guided by the mission statement… “Increasing the development of tennis coaches in Guyana in order to achieve higher participation and better results in the sport of tennis.”
The objectives of the body are to promote and encourage an increased number of tennis coaches in Guyana; to develop the quality of coaches by sharing knowledge among the coaches and to bring about tennis awareness in Guyana.
“If we bring in the adults the awareness will spread. We haven’t had one (tennis camp for adults) in quite a while; it was always the juniors that got the focus. And you would have the parents sometimes coming with their kids to tennis but they don’t really understand the sport, so we want to give persons such as parents and other adults the opportunity to get into the sport,” Lopes said.
According to Lopes, the courses will be conducted by himself, Sue-Ho, Chand, Shelly Daly-Ramdyhan, Leyland Leacock, Jeremy Miller and Nicholas Glasgow.
