New coaches for new era

David Baker wants to find the next generation of talent Whanganui tennis players.

The new coaches helping out the Wanganui Tennis Club have gone back to the coal face to find as many talented youngsters as they can to build on the legacy of representative success in the past five years.

With talented international junior players like Kyle Butters and Paige Hourigan having gone overseas, along with several other promising teenagers also departed town, the club has lost several of the key fixtures in their Christie Cup winning team of the past four summers, which was compounded by the departure of professional coach Victor Romero to Manawatu last season.

Having been trained himself on those same courts by John Gardner back in the day, professional coach David Baker has recently returned from living in Perth to form a business partnership with Feilding and Palmerston North coach Kurt McNamara - called PROMAC.

Together, the pair are now responsible for setting up coaching programmes for the clubs and schools from Feilding through to South Taranaki.

Starting off with 4-8 week programmes after the term holidays, Baker said they have been "cold calling" schools to try and drum up numbers interested in taking up the game.

From there, he hopes to work with the WTC's junior committee to set up deals where players who find they like the sport will want to take part more seriously and sign up with the club.

"At the moment I'm just in recruiting mode," Baker said.

"All the [WTC] oldies say to me, 'we need more youngsters'.

"Our job now is go through the schools and find more kids."

Around six Whanganui schools have signed up for PROMAC to offer coaching to their students, with Baker estimating he and McNamara could meet with around 1500 juniors across the wider region.

"All our groups have doubled, just by ringing schools and getting the kids."

While the Wanganui representative team still holds the Christie Cup, it is accepted they will be lucky to get through another summer with the Central Districts team trophy still in their possession after the loss of Hourigan, Butters, Michael O'Callahan, and sisters Gabrielle and Dana Hiri among several others.

"If we got all those kids for Christie Cup, that's a pretty good team," said Baker.

The idea of their coaching programme is to find players who will want to make tennis their No1 sport so they focus on it for the full 12 months, not just picking it up every summer.

"You're trying to keep them in the game and hopefully by winter, they're still hitting balls down at the club."

McNamara will be bringing his Palmerston North group of elite youth players to Whanganui today for the start of the 2016 Open, and Baker said they have a goal of setting up a similar travelling group by combining players from the Feilding and Wanganui tennis clubs.

"That's what we want to have in Whanganui - a tournament team of kids."