Spring 2023 - Newsletter

Greetings from our President Elaine Paige OBE

It’s a pleasure to welcome you once again to our Dan Maskell Tennis Trust Newsletter – the first of a busy 2023! You will see below that we have already held our Recreational Wheelchair Doubles Event, in memory of Cathie Sabin, which was a great success. I personally am looking forward to our Golf Day, which will be taking place shortly after this newsletter is released. I look forward to reporting back to you in the next newsletter about how the day went and hopefully a nice big fundraising amount raised!

On that note I encourage you all to take part in our summer fundraiser – the ‘Disability Dash’ and look forward to hearing all the fun ways you helped us to raise funds to help more disabled players take part in our wonderful sport of tennis.

We will all be eagerly supporting our British Wheelchair Tennis players at Wimbledon this year and I hope many of you are able to get along and watch The Championships in person, it is such a magical experience.

I am delighted to see below that we continue to work so closely with our friends at the LTA – Tennis for Britain. Over the last two years we have been working with them to deliver disability coaching camps and their staff help advise us on our grant applications. Recently the LTA Tennis Foundation  announced funding for our Trust over the next 3 years. We are delighted to be able to put this funding straight into our grant aid budget.

On closing I want to wish you all, our wonderful supporters, a joyful summer filled with sunshine and of course; strawberries and cream!

Love,

Elaine's website

Recreational Wheelchair Tennis Doubles event 2023 

Our 2023 Recreational Wheelchair Tennis Doubles event took place over the weekend of April 29 and 30 at Oxstalls Sports Park in Gloucester and was a great success.  After so long not being able to run the event it was wonderful to see so many faces, new and old, over the weekend. 28 players took part in the event and we must say a big congratulations to every player who joined in; all matches were played in a friendly spirit with a touch of competition thrown in!

The event was run in memory of the great Cathie Sabin, who was a devoted supporter of disability tennis and a former Trustee of DMTT. Cathie’s family attended the event and helped with our presentations, as well as making a generous donation which enabled us to run the event, with funds raised in her memory. You can watch a short video wrap up here.

Disability Camps with the LTA

We have already held three of our disability coaching camps this year, which all received excellent feedback from players. Organised in partnership with the LTA, the B1 (Blind) Camp was held at the NTC Roehampton on Saturday 29 April, the Wheelchair Camp was held at Cardiff Met University on Saturday 13 May and the LD Camp - which was oversubscribed, was held at West Bridgford Tennis Club on Saturday 3 June. Players were treated to world class coaching from Louise Assioun, Joe Eckersely, Geraint Richards, Will Croft, Sue Morrison and Andy Bell.

A massive highlight for our B1 players was Jack Draper joining them on court! Jack popped on a blind fold and was a great sport, playing and answering questions for over an hour. We were so grateful to Jack, you can check out some of the action here. 

We still have a Visually Impaired camp in mid June.

Wheelchair World Team Cup 2023

A massive congratulations to the GB Wheelchair World Team Cup Squad who recently competed in the finals in Vilamoura, Portugal. The GB Men’s Team won gold after a great final against the Netherlands and our Junior team also won gold, up against USA in the final. Our Women’s team finished 4^th after missing out on the bronze play off against France. You can read more on the LTA website.

Summer fundraiser

We are excited to be launching a summer fundraiser! We are asking everyone, players, coaches, supporters to join in and help us raise funds by taking part in a physical challenge. This could be a run, a handcycle, wheelchair push, bike ride – anything!

We are naming it our Dan Maskell Disability Dash and you can check out our justgiving page here for more details. We encourage you to give it a Wimbledon inspired theme, you could finish with a tea party, or just host a tea party on it's own.

If you don’t feel quite up to a Physical challenge you could come up with a quirky tennis activity, like our friends at We Do Tennis have been doing, so far they have raised over £750 for us – check out some ideas here.

**STOP PRESS!!** Coming soon – an exciting auction– signed memorabilia and experiences will be up for grabs in our Wimbledon Fundraising Campaign.  Details will be on our website towards the end of June and a separate announcement will be sent to you for a priority peek!

Play your way to Wimbledon 

We were so excited to hear that in 2023 there have been some big changes to the largest individual mass participation tennis competition in the UK, Play Your Way to Wimbledon, powered by Vodafone. Players start by competing locally at an event with the winners progressing through to the County and/or Area Finals, and then onto the National Finals at Wimbledon.

This year adult and disability categories have been added to the junior categories. Nine regional disability events will act as qualifying tournaments, across Wheelchair, Learning Disability and Visually Impaired tennis. The Play Your Way to Wimbledon National Finals will be held at the All England Club in August. Players will get to play on the Aorangi courts as well as have personalised tours of the historic Grounds and Museum.

Virtus Squad

The LTA have announced their squad for the Virtus 6^th Global Games. These games are for players with a learning disability who are the elite players in each sport. The Games will take place in Vichy (France) from June 4 – 10. We are so proud of two of our Ambassadors, Lily Mills and Luke Turnbull who have been selected for the squad. Also selected on the squad are:

Men’s Players; Dominic Iannotti, Fabrice Higgins, Oliver Beadle, Luke Turnbull, Aidan Moody

Women’s’ Players; Anna McBride, Lily Mills

We have funded five of the seven selected players in the last year with our grant aid funding. Good luck to the whole team!

Golf Day 2023

At the time of writing, we are edging towards our annual Fundraising event – the Golf Challenge – to be held at the RAC Club, Woodcote Park, Epsom on the 16^th June.  A full report will appear in the Summer Newsletter but we are hopeful of a full house of 18 teams for a shotgun start.  Elaine will join us together with Vice-Presidents Marcus Buckland and Andrew Castle.