By Neto Baptiste
Tennis players across Antigua and Barbuda and within the Caribbean region who are seeking to make a living as a pro could find it difficult getting onto the circuit.
This is according to Jody Maginley, the country’s lone professional player, who said this is not due to a lack of talent but to a scarcity of adequate competitions to better prepare players throughout the region.
“I do know that maybe few of the countries in the Caribbean have more tennis players than Antigua and the tennis community is a little bit stronger than it is here, but they also don’t have that many players making it [as pros], so one of the things we miss a lot is competition.
“There is only a handful of tennis clubs here and it’s the same in almost all of the other Caribbean countries because the tennis community is only so big. They can’t keep just playing each other week in and week out as eventually it gets a bit repetitive,” he said.
The player, who has an Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) singles ranking of 1,266 and a doubles ranking of 748, believes that the introducing of more regional competitions could be a good place to start.
“Maybe — before when we had the OECS tournament or, for example, the swimming event they had recently that Antigua won — if they implemented something like that for tennis it would be another thing for young tennis players to get excited about, to see and to play. So, I think that’s the bigger thing, to play more tournaments,” Maginley said.
“It’s expensive for these teams to travel and play in other islands versus when I was in Florida when I was 16. I would play in a tournament every weekend because it was just 10 minutes away and it was at the same place and everyone signed up and everyone played,” he added.
President of the Antigua and Barbuda Tennis Association (ABTA) Cordell Williams said in a previous interview that Antigua and Barbuda are at the forefront of efforts to revive the OECS competition.