By Neto Baptiste
The Antigua and Barbuda Tennis Association (ABTA) is no longer in a position to host International Tennis Federation (ITF) sanctioned tournaments, at least not in the immediate future.
This is according to President of the association, Cordell Williams, who said that with the loss of the two courts at the Halcyon Hotel, which his academy no longer occupies, the country does not meet the regulations dictating the number of courts that must be available to host recognised tournaments.
“Quite recently, we lost the four courts we had at Halcyon so we are basically on a rebuilding stage. I have to say thanks to Mr Mathias and Miss Davis because I am no longer at Halcyon, I am at the US base and getting those courts up there in tournament condition, because come December 9-16, from the OECS region, we are hosting an under-10, 12, 14 and 16 tournament here,” he said.
Highlighting that the scheduled junior tournament is a Caribbean competition, Williams said the hope is to have as many junior players as possible competing on the circuit in hopes of picking up valuable ranking points ahead of major tennis tournaments.
“Come next year, we want to get our junior players back out on tour. The Commonwealth Youth Games are going to be in Trinidad and so we have to get our junior players back up to competition level and have them now start to go out and play so they could get ranking, because one of the criteria is that you have to be ranked to get into the qualifier for the junior Commonwealth Games. So even though we have had them practicing, we have to now get them out on tour so they could start to get their points so we could at least get two boys and two girls qualified for that, or three and three,” the coach said.
Williams was forced to seek an alternate venue for his academy after being asked to vacate the courts at Halcyon after more than 30 years at the facility. The two courts were used as training venues while the four new courts at Campsite were used for competition purposes during ITF tournaments.