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.