Many of you have taken a customary August break and, with things a little quieter around the club this month, we decided it was time to have a root through the club archives.

Did you know we were once 3 separate clubs:  a lawn tennis club with 9 courts, a hard courts club with 3 courts, and a squash club with 1 court?  For any local history buffs, we’ve made some fascinating discoveries!

The timeline for what is now BLT&SRC goes back to 1897.  Next year is our 125th anniversary - now that’s a cause for a celebration!  Watch this space.

Moving on

With it being the end of school days for a number of our younger members, a special mention to a couple of our tennis and squash academy juniors who are now embarking on the next step in their tennis and squash journeys.

Joel Pierleoni, who has been training at Berkhamsted since the mini-red stage, will be heading to the University of New Mexico on a tennis scholarship.  Joel is a former junior European Champion and finished in the top 5 in the world in 2017.  He has won numerous U18 international titles along the way.

Another of our long-standing tennis juniors, Reece Farrow, is also heading to the States.  Not only will he be playing tennis, but he will be studying neuroscience in the honours college of one of the best universities in this field, New York’s Adelphi University.

On the squash side, Ollie Green, who has come all the way through our Academy system of mini-improvers-elites, and was the junior National Champion in 2018, has gained a squash scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania.

Congratulations to them and to all our other juniors in their exam successes!  For those off to Uni, we will be sad to see you go, but wish you all the best in the next step of your journey.  Keep playing tennis and squash for life!

Tennis

We are now just 3 weeks away from one of the highlights of our year:  tennis club finals day on Saturday 11th September.  Mark it in your diary and let’s have a great turnout.

You will notice, and will have read, that we’ve given courts 1, 2 and 3 a long overdue fresh topping of clay.  And in the past couple of days we’ve given the retaining wall a new lick of paint.  Please help maintain the clay courts by sweeping them after you have played.

You will also see any day now a new feature added to the outdoor court booking system:  a reminder e-mail 24 hours before each booking.  A gentle nudge to make sure, if you no longer require the court, to cancel it and make it available to someone else, so we avoid the no-shows taking away playing opportunities from others.

Squash and Squash57

The Berkhamsted LinkSap Open was a huge success and marked our return to hosting a professional event after a gap of 10 years.

The men’s event was won by Ben Coleman, world number 60 and one of our Academy pro hub players who trains at our club 3 days a week.  The women’s was won by Gina Kennedy, currently world number 74 but on track to be world top 20 by the end of the year.  Club coach, Grace Gear, overcame the number 5 seed in the 1st round but lost 3-1 in the quarter-finals to the losing finalist and world number 37 Lisa Aitken.

We hope to make the event an annual tournament on the Challenger Tour.  Thank-you to our tournament sponsors, without whom we could not have put it on and announced ourselves on the Tour schedule.

A word about our Head Squash Coach, Adam Fuller.  We are thrilled to tell you that Adam has this week been confirmed as Head Coach for the England Potential Programme, leading the preparations for the Five Nations Team Championships and European U15/17 Team Championships.  Alongside his role for us; nothing changes in that respect.

We are now getting ready for the new season, with Herts League and Bucks League fixtures commencing at the end of September/start of October.  It will be great to have inter-club matches and rivalries back!

This coming season we will also be entering the Herts Ladies League.  Fabulous to see the return of a women’s squash team for the club!

In fact, England Squash’s Women’s Squash Week is coming soon, week beginning 20th September.  Mark it in your diaries - we want to get as many of our women members as possible (yes, even you tennis members!) involved in playing squash and squash57 (aka racketball)!

Just in time for that, we’re going to re-carpet the spectator area behind court 1 to make it a bit more welcoming - the current beer-stained edition is 10 years old and in dire need of replacement.

One final point.  With our internal box leagues now back into full swing, we have linked up with SquashLevels to synch our box results with their rankings database.  We briefly looked at this before everything stopped 18 months ago, and we are now on the case again.  Shortly, you’ll be able to see where you rank in the country/county/club!

Club Open Day

While we are talking about dates for the diary, our next Club Open Day is on Sunday 26th September.  Come on down!  

Why not bring friends and family too and get them to have a go at tennis, squash and squash57 - we’ll have rackets and balls available and the coaches will be on hand to help them out.

Social

With everything feeling a bit more normal once again, Bobby Mercandino has formed a new Social Committee and they are full of beans, with a few events already being scheduled for all members (details to follow soon):

• 20th October sees the return of the mighty Quiz Night;
• 31st October there will be a Kids and Adult tennis tournament with prizes, run by our fantastic tennis coaches; and
• 4th December the annual Dinner and Disco will be back with a bang!

Car park

Last but not least, and we’ll try not to turn our newsletter parting words into a ‘rants and pants’ (done far better by another stalwart of the local community!), please manoeuvre carefully in the car park.  We all park there at our own risk but, in recent weeks, there have been a couple of incidents of minor bumps and doors opened too heavily.  If you are involved in a scrape or a scratch, please do the decent thing and leave a note on the other car’s windscreen with your contact details.

That’s all for now.  Hopefully we’ll see lots of you at the Tennis Club Finals Day!

Club Council

(John Shaw, Matt Markwort, Phil Trimmer, Tracey Mackey, Mark Shattock, Bobby Mercandino)