By Owen Morgan
Penarth will be hosting some of Britain’s top ranked tennis players along with a number of world ranked professionals as it stages one of the country’s most prestigious tournaments next week.
The LTA British Tour, previously known as the Aegon Tour, comes to Windsor Lawn Tennis Club in Penarth – the only Welsh stop on the circuit.
The Penarth tournament is one of only 11 events on the 35-date British tour which are rated as Premier or Tier One standard.
Windsor Lawn Tennis Club chairman Anthony Phillips, said the club was delighted to be bringing such a high quality tournament to Wales.
“It is great to put Wales on the map with this tournament and hopefully it will inspire our next generation of up and coming youngsters,” he told Dai Sport.
“As a new event we are delighted with the quality of the entrants who will be playing. We have a number of world ranked players, some overseas players and our men’s main draw will comprise almost exclusively of players rated 1.1, which typically means they will all be ranked within the UK top 100 players.”
Among the Welsh contingent taking part are Evan Hoyt, of Llanelli, who is trying to fight his way back into upper echelons of the game after suffering a succession of injuries.
As a junior he reached No.53 in the ITF Junior World Rankings, was a doubles semi-finalist at Junior Wimbledon and helped the British team to win the Junior Davis Cup for first time.
Aged 16 he ‘hit’ for five successive days with Rafael Nadal in the second week at Wimbledon before the Spaniard’s appearance in the 2011 final. The 23-year-old recently won a doubles event in Egypt.
The women’s draw features 20-year-old Kimberley Mpukusa, from Swansea, who stopped playing competitively when she was 13 because her family’s asylum case made it harder for them to travel for practice and competition.
However, Kimberley continued her training using many of Swansea’s local parks and after her family was granted an indefinite stay in the UK she became Wales’ top ranked U-18 player.
Attracting such a high quality tournament to South Wales hasn’t been easy, says Mr Phillips: “This has taken us two years to organise and in fact it is the only stop on the tour in Wales.
“We managed to do this by attracting sponsorship money from The Chiltern Group, who two years ago laid our brand new state of the art synthetic clay courts, which were the only top quality surface in Wales at the time.
“Chiltern have been fantastic to deal with and will hopefully lay these clay courts to many more clubs in Wales, which will help improve the quality and standard of the players we can produce.”
The tournament comprises both men’s singles and a ladies’ singles competitions with a qualifier tournament taking place on Monday 7th and Tuesday 8th of May.
The main draw then starts on Wednesday, May 9, and runs through until the finals on Saturday, May 12, kicking off at noon.
The event is free to attend and Mr Phillips is hoping it will attract spectators and budding tennis players alike.
He said: “Play will start around 10am on most weekdays and will run until the evenings to allow spectators to watch after work or school.
“The tournament is free to watch and the clubhouse will be open to sell light snacks as well as soft and alcoholic drinks.”
“We are hoping to create a festival of tennis atmosphere with lots of tennis activities going on for our club members with fun tournaments, a fastest serve competition, a sponsors’ clubhouse meal and a hog roast evening. We’ve even got a sponsored free ice cream van for the finals on Saturday.”
Further details about the tournament are available on the LTA website.