Academies arrange tourneys

Two of New Zealand’s leading tennis academies are coming to the rescue to help out with the problem of there not being enough tournaments in this country.

In Tennis NZ’s Athlete Development Pathway document it recommends a 16-year-old girl should play between 24-28 tournaments a year and a 16-yearold boy between 27 and 30.

While more will be added, Tennis NZ’s tournament calendar has just six tournaments currently listed on its event calendar from May until the end of the year.

Sebastian Lavie, who runs the Lavie Tennis Academy and Dwayne Cleugh from Sparta Tennis have both come up with separate plans to put tournaments on, which will crucially count towards a players’ UTR ranking, helping them get a scholarship to a US college.

Lavie is putting on a Masters type event for the top eight female players in the country, there are two pools of four, followed by playoffs. For the first event, taking place tomorrow and Friday and there is $1500 of prize money available.

After this event, Lavie plans to put on many more tournaments, some with prize money and some for players at a lower level and he said his motivation for doing this was to help out aspiring players.

‘‘I’m coaching kids to be the best they can be,’’ Lavie said.

‘‘There’s only a certain amount of time we can spend training, before they need to get put into a pressure situation, to see if what we’re doing is working. My incentive came from a bit of agitation around the lack of tournaments possible for the players to compete in.

‘‘That starts from the age of 15 and over. So for 14s and under, there are enough matches if you go find them. But after that, in the current environment where we can’t travel, there’s just nothing for them to do.

‘‘These kids have college and professional dreams and they’re really getting late in that journey if they can’t compete more.

‘‘Now we’re in a position where we’ve got some great sponsors that want to support this vision and are making it happen, they’re not only helping to make this happen, but also putting up prize money.’’

Once the inaugural event is done, Lavie will look to set up other tournaments.

‘‘We’re using this as a pilot event and we’ll use this format throughout the year,’’ he said.

‘‘We may make some tweaks, but the current structure of it is that it will guarantee players four matches over the weekend. Those matches will be based on UTR rankings, so they’ll be playing against players with a similar ranking to themselves and get competitive match play.

‘‘We’ll keep a certain amount of spots for juniors, but we don’t want to close the door to people who are 18 and over and want to compete.’’ Lavie is aiming to put up between $50,000 and $100,000 of prize money up over the year, running around 20 top level events.

Including the lower level tournaments, he’s hoping to organise 1000 matches a year within three years, which equates to around 60-70 events.

The first event will be at Auckland’s Next Generation Tennis Club, which is part of the complex where the ASB Classic is held.

But once he has the irons wrinkled out, he’s looking to offer the template to clubs around the country.