Covid serves up more disruptions for TNZ

Tennis New Zealand has been forced to move its only remaining ITF Junior tournament this side of Christmas from Hamilton to Christchurch, while there remains plenty of uncertainty about the upcoming summer of tennis.

Because of Covid-19, this month’s ITF Junior tournaments in Auckland and Nelson were cancelled and this week Tennis NZ announced that the Hamilton event would be moved to the

South Island, because of the level 3 restrictions covering part of Waikato.

For young players in Auckland, who have only been able to train again for the past couple of weeks, while the rest of the country has been playing tournaments, it might be a tough pill to swallow to be excluded from an ITF tournament, because of lockdown.

However, Tennis NZ CEO Julie Paterson said they’ve tried to make the best of a tough situation.

‘‘The challenge is trying to find a balance that is going to work for everyone and that’s just not possible at the moment because of Paterson said.

‘‘While we knew it was going to have implications for players based in Auckland, we felt it wasn’t right to be disadvantaging other players who could access the tournament.

‘‘If we were able to field enough players to make the tournament competitive and at a level it needed to be at, then that was the right thing to do.

‘‘We are tightly governed by the ITF as it’s an ITF level tournament, so a lot of other options that were debated and put to the ITF were turned down, but the circumstances,’’ this option was accepted.’’

Tennis NZ high performance director, Christophe Lambert said they had looked at holding an ITF tournament inside the Auckland boundary, but this wasn’t possible under level 3 restrictions.

‘‘We went through all the possibilities on what we could do and the only option was to put a tournament in a place where they weren’t in lockdown,’’ Lambert said.

‘‘In Auckland in level 3, you can have matchplay, but not organised tournaments.’’