Stringers Course Confirmed for Cork

Here's a great opportunity to learn how to string or to learn more about stringing.

The course is a Professional Stringers Course and will be held on Saturday and Sunday the 10th and 11th of November in Rushbrooke tennis club.
If you are interested please email Liam Nolan on liam@ukrsa.com and he will send you out a full agenda for the two days.

“Following on from the successes of two Professional Stringer courses held in Dublin, Liam Nolan, former Wimbledon Head Stringer will be coming to Cork in August.

Liam is also Founder and Technical Director of the UK Racket stringers Association, under whose umbrella there is a growing Irish stringing group. The course is open to all, whether a beginner or an experienced stringer who wants to learn how to do things as it is done for the pro’s at Wimbledon and other Grand Slams.

The two days of training are busy, friendly and informal, no final test at the end, fully certificated and attracts full coaching credits. Course members will leave with the skills, knowledge and confidence to tackle any racket servicing task on all badminton, squash, racquetball and tennis rackets. You can bring along your own rackets to work on if you wish and there may be some new stringing machines for sale at the end of the course. The cost is reduced from £249.00 to just 200 Euros and this can be paid on arrival.

Munster Challenge Cup

Hi all,

The first annual Munster Challenge Cup will take place February 2013. 

The venue and date will be confirmed at a later date, for now I just want to give you some information on what the event is about.

The event will be North Munster (Limerick, Tipperary and Clare) V South Munster.  Each team will consist of 8 men.  The make up of the team will be 2 juniors, 2 seniors, 2 vets and 2 of your choice.

The format on the day will be 8 singles matches and 4 doubles matches.  In the event of a tie, the match will be decided with one tiebreak set of doubles.  The captain of each team will choose the pair.

The singles will be drawn on the day, so you could have a vet play a junior or 2 seniors play each other.

The doubles will be junior against junior, senior against senior and so on.

Each match will be the best of 3 tie-break sets.

Like I said earlier I would like to make this an annual event, playing one year in South Munster and the next in North Munster, with a Perpetual Cup.

I think it will be a very entertaining event and will give us good, competitive match practice which we don’t have too much of.

The captains for the first match will be Kevin Rea for the North and myself for the South.

If you are interested in playing please contact your relevant captain and let them know.  Remember though we can only pick 8 players so don’t be offended if not selected this year.

Kevin Rea – rea.kevin@gmail.com

Rob Leahy – rob_leahy@yahoo.co.uk

Tennis Ireland National Tennis Academy

Tennis Ireland National Tennis Academy

The BNP Paribas National Tennis Academy is a Programme designed by Tennis Ireland to bring the top Irish players to one central location where they can train with players of a similar ability and develop their skills under one roof at Dublin City University (DCU).

History

The National Tennis Academy began in 2003 at Westwood Leopardstown in the South of Dublin where Technical Director Garry Cahill (pictured below) brought together seven young junior players to train twice a week, by late 2003 this programme was successful enough to expand its training programme to three times a week for a total of nine hours. The bulk of this initial squad of seven have now gone on to compete at international level, players such as Mark Bowtell, Niall Fitzgerald, and John Morrissey have all progressed to compete at the highest international level. Other players from this original squad are still with the Academy (Sam Barry and Amy Bowtell) and continue to reap the rewards from the programme.

Facilities

The BNP Paribas National Academy Squad can benefit from the international standard facilities at DCU to help them improve their technical skills, fitness, and physical qualities in order to compete at the highest level on the world tennis circuit. The National Tennis Centre at DCU is the main base for players in the BNP Paribas National Tennis Academy, here players can avail of the Centres 10 multi-surface, all-weather courts. This means that Squad players can prepare for international tournaments before leaving Ireland on a surface similar to what they will compete on abroad. The National Tennis Centre also incorporates state-of-the-art match analysis technology which allows our Coaches to monitor all aspects of a players on-court performance from service technique to tactical examination during a match. Situated beside the National Tennis Centre is the DCU Sports Gymnasium, home to several of Ireland's current Olympic athletes. At the Sports Gymnasium Squad players concentrate on their body conditioning with various tools such as Hammer Strength equipment, Life-Fitness Cardio equipment and Ice Bath facilities for player recovery.

By July 2005 the Squad had expanded its training programme once more to four days a week relocating from Leopardstown to the newly built National Tennis Centre at Dublin City University. By 2006 the current BNP Paribas National Tennis Academy structure began to take shape as the squad size increased in number to eleven full-time players (including players training and living in DCU as residential squad members) with three coaches, and one physical trainer employed full-time.

Since 2007 the Academy has seen further growth to what now has become a 23 member strong squad of both full-time and part-time players (from 11 to 18 years of age). Since the completion of Phase 2 of the National Tennis Centre and the addition of six extra courts in 2008, Garry Cahill has been given the opportunity to invite Ireland's top Senior Tennis stars to the facility to train with and compete with the older Academy players. This not only helps the Juniors in their training routine and the opportunity to play against strong opponents, it also helps keep the Senior players sharp while in Ireland.

Performance

Full-time squad players at the Academy now train between 24 to 30 hours per week (depending on the age of the player) while part-time squad members train from 6-9 hours a week. Training programmes at the Academy are structured to meet the individual needs of every player based around the strengths and weaknesses of each player. Each players programme also includes a calendar programme of international competitions (Tennis Europe, Junior ITF, ATP/WTA events) allowing the player to compete against the best Europe and the World have to offer.

Rushbrooke LT & CC Dual Munster Champions

The finals of the Munster Junior Club competitions took place yesterday in Sundays Well Tennis Club with some fabulous tennis played throughout all age groups.

Rushbrooke U-18 team won their final 5-1 against Limerick Lawn and in doing so gave the club their second Munster Title of the year.

A few weeks previous the senior team won The Munster Senior Cup in a hard fought match in Waterford also against Limerick Lawn. 

By winning yesterday, three of the senior team, (Emily and Rachel Daly and David Gardiner) completed what has to be a rare double.

This is an outstanding achievement by these three young players and also the rest of their team, Jane Daly, Adam Rasmussen and Mark Hannon. 

I presume the double has been done before (would love to know for definite, so if anyone can update me that would be great), but regardless it is a great achievement by Rushbrooke and the future is bright for them.

Tennis - A blog by a journalism student from Tipperary.

Here's a good tennis blog which keeps you up to date on the world of international tennis.  Some very good articles and definitely worth a read.  I enjoyed it and will be checking in on it regularly.
Here's a link to it and to make it easy to find in the future I have added it to my Friends of Cork Tennis section on the right of the blog, read it here.

A great days tennis guaranteed!

MUNSTER BRANCH

TENNIS IRELAND

JUNIOR CUP/SHIELD COMPETITIONS

FINALS’ DAY

7TH OCTOBER 2012

VENUE: SUNDAY’S WELL BOATING & TENNIS CLUB

U12 MAHER SPORTS CUP

BISHOPSTOWN VS LARKSPUR CASHEL

U12 MAHERS SPORTS SHIELD

KILLALOE/BALLINA OR ENNIS VS ST. ANNE’S WATERFORD.

U14 CUP

ST. ANNE’S WATERFORD VS TRAMORE

U14 SHIELD

NENAGH VS LARKSPUR CASHEL

U.18 CUP

RUSHBROOKE VS LIMERICK LAWN

REFEREES: STEPHEN MCCARTHY/CAROLINE LAWLOR

A History of the Munster Senior Cup

Below is a section of an article written by Tony O Donoghue, Limerick Lawn, on the Munster Senior Cup.  I have played in the Munster Senior Cup on a few occassions and I have had this article for a while now and never really read it properly.  This Cup has being played for by some of the finest tennis players, not just in Munster, but in Ireland since 1907.  If the Cup could speak it would have some amazing stories to tell of hardship and joy.  I really enjoyed reading the article and to be honest am disappointed in myself now that I didn't make a bigger effort to play in this fabulous event more often.
I hope you enjoy the article as much as I did and if you are a player who is able to take part for your club please do and continue creating the history of this fine Cup.

I would like to thank Tony for all the obvious hard work he put in to put this article in place and hopefully I can convince him to bring it up to date soon.  Enjoy!

The Beginning


Norman Brooks a tall left-hander from Australia was the first male overseas player to win Wimbledon. The year was 1907. History was being made. Picture the time it took, six weeks to travel by boat from Australia to Wimbledon.

No two or three cars per home. You would be lucky to have two or three cars per club. Your Ford car could be any colour as long it was black. They had just taken the man with the red flag away from the front of the car. The speed limit was how fast you could get it to go.

All this made it very difficult to play competitive matches between clubs in Munster. Matches were probably played over the weekend. With only grass courts available there was no play before 11am because of the dew on the grass and then of course the need to finish before bad light.

Rumour has it that if a player owned a car their chance of being selected greatly enhanced. This was the first year the Munster Senior Cup was played for - history was beginning.
First Winners
The first winners of the Munster Senior Cup were Rushbrooke - who they defeated in the final is unknown. Then in 1908, Blackrock had to travel to Cobh to win and get their name on the Cup.

I know it's hard to believe but Tralee were the winners in 1909. Can you imagine the journey and the time it took for Tralee? 1910 saw Inishannon just outside Cork won. So in the first four years four different clubs shared the Cup.

From 1911 to 1914 Blackrock took charge of the Munster Cup. Included in these teams were F.J. Daly, J.J. Daly, M.J. Daly, and Capt J. Higgon and Rev. J. Connolly. The ladies were Mrs. Madden, Miss Haughton, Mrs. Lyons, Miss Tivy and Mrs. M.J. Daly.

Ben Haughton who played in all of the four teams went on to win eight Munster Cups with Blackrock and was a major asset to the team.
War Interuptions
The Cup was put in cold storage from 1915 to 1919. This was during the First World War and as we were still part of the British Empire, and Tennis in those early days was mostly played where there was a British Army Barracks, naturally tennis ...........to continue reading click here