Dan Bloxham Talks The Future of British Tennis

08 July 2009

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Dan Bloxham is at the forefront of British tennis as head coach at the All England Club coaching the next generation of players.

This week he is working alongside Tim Henman on the initiative Shine Week that is encouraging school children to take up sport. I caught up with him to talk about the project and the future of British tennis.

- You are part of the Shine Week scheme so can you tell me a little bit about it?

I think everyone realises that we need to get kids more active and more involved with sport and healthy lifestyles, and just accessing talent in kids as a whole. Anything that can promote that, I’m just looking at Tim here who’s just walked into the school and the kids are going mad, I think things like that, we are in Middlesex in Hayes, it’s a normal days at school but these things create a buzz which then hopefully has a legacy in the school for a long time.

Certainly the kids that I have seen, I’m getting on to see ninety thousand kids in schools, and I know that there is a lot of talent there and it’s just a case of giving the kids and the teachers the confidence to have a go and get involved in sport and do things that will let the kids excel.

- As you say you are working alongside Tim Henman so what is your role in the scheme and how did you get involved.

Luckily for me at the All England Club I run an outreach programme, which is probably the biggest outreach programmes in the country, so that probably puts me as one the most experienced coaches at school sport in the country and obviously HSBC are a joint sponsor of the Road to Wimbledon so we cross over at club so they invited me, along with Tim,  and work in their schools programme as well.  

- And what do you hope that Shine Week will ultimately achieve?

If we can get kids to enjoy their sport and use their talent in whatever form it is, obviously I’m here on a tennis front, whether it’s music, drama or art whatever the thing is that they are into as long as we can get them to open up their talents then that has to be a fantastic thing.

- You say that you are there in a tennis role and you are you are the head coach at the All England Club  so what is your role at Wimbledon and how are you pushing the kids forward?

I’m the head coach so I take the players onto Centre and Court 1, so I’m master of ceremony. I also run the WJTI, which is the Wimbledon Junior Tennis Initiative, the outreach arm of the All England Club where we go to the schools and the kids receive a free scholarship back into Wimbledon.

-  So what did you think of the criticism that came the way of the British players and the LTA when only Baltacha and Murray made it through the first round at Wimbledon?

Well obviously working for the All England Club the tournament that we run is unbelievably successful and I think that we, us and the LTA,  we are all trying to get to the same place by developing more players and better players, I know that the LTA re working very hard in schools to try and create that opportunity for kids to get better.

I think we all feel that the one thing that we need to do is make sure that more kids play and that it’s maybe not the same the same type of kids that played historically, which would have been from a middle class background, we need to access a greater number of kids playing.

And from that, if you access more kids, you are going to get one of two that are unbelievable and catching up with Andy (Murray). But if we pick from a small amount of kids each time it’s going to be very difficult for us to compete with countries that are picking from double or treble the amount of kids.

- Do you think that this is the problem there is still very much a class stigma with tennis, even now? It’s not an easy sport to access so do you think that this is the driving force behind why we haven’t been successful as we could have?

Yeah I think it certainly has been perceived as a middle class sport for a lot of years so the average person doesn’t think about playing tennis. Certainly to play to a level it’s not exceptionally expensive anymore the raquets are abut £25 so staring off isn’t that expensive. But like most sports to stronger and really develop it’s still quite expensive and that is something that needs to address.

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