Grafting in the sun (…and on the cooler courts of Thongsbridge!)
It can sometimes look so glamorous, but the graft that goes on in the life of a tennis junior should never be underrated. After an exceptionally busy February half term, seeing junior member Seb Beetlestone taking the U12 National Indoor Singles and Doubles title in Bath, his schedule then sent him straight into the Tennis Europe Junior International in Nottingham, where he reached the semi-finals in the singles and banked a fantastic experience playing other juniors from across Europe!
Seb has just returned from a National Training Camp in Girona, Spain. This great opportunity to travel as part of a group of the best 16 U12’s and U13’s boys in Great Britain was not lost on Seb as he continued to ‘put in a shift’, spending a week in the Spanish sunshine on the red clay to prepare for the upcoming clay season.
The National Camps are an opportunity to ‘train like a pro’. Early starts, 2 sessions of intensive on-court drills each day, match practice each afternoon, strength and conditioning sessions in the gym and and then off-court mental skills, tactics and resilience sessions. After all the work, thankfully, the team made sure there was a little downtime for beach football and swimming (although the pool was a little chilly still)! The camp culminated in a ‘Davies Cup’ style competition against boys from Catalan Academy. GB took the win convincingly!
Seb is back training at home now and making sure he is catching up on school work, too. His training week is split between squads at CV8 Academy in Leeds and sessions with Nick and Kieron, here at Thongsbridge.
Keep watching this space, as next up is the Tennis Europe Junior International and the Welsh Junior Open, both in Wrexham, North Wales, over the Easter holidays. And then who knows…Seb is currently ranked 5th in GB for U12’s boys and he is hoping to make the selection for some of the Summer’s GB fixtures, so keep working hard Seb, it’s all out there for your to grasp! Good luck buster, we will keep watching your progress!