Leading British tennis players, including the men’s world No. 5 Jack Draper and women’s world No. 38 Katie Boulter, have written to U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer asking for greater investment in the country’s tennis and sporting facilities.
In a letter signed by Draper, Boulter, Alfie Hewett, Gordon Reid, and Lucy Shuker (the country’s top-ranked players in men’s and women’s singles, and men’s and women’s wheelchair singles and doubles), the players wrote that “too many places around the country still do not have access to high quality community sports facilities.”
The players acknowledged that the U.K. government has been investing in grassroots tennis alongside the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) over the last few years, and urged Starmer to continue to do so. The Parks Tennis Project, a joint initiative between the government, the LTA and the LTA Tennis Foundation — has seen 3,000 public tennis courts renovated across Britain.
Draper and his colleagues wrote in the letter that: “A new national network of community accessible covered tennis, padel and multi-sport hubs would support year-round play, and grow participation, particularly among underserved communities and disabled people. Delivering this network in partnership with the LTA would bring the benefits of sport to so many more people across the country.”
Hewett and Reid are reigning Australian Open champions (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)
Important to the players is finding a way to overcome the British weather. Rain means more of a need for indoor courts, but those are more expensive to build and then access than open-air courts. The letter suggests “new light-weight, all-weather canopy structures, that allow courts to be covered easily, without the expense of a full indoor centre being built.”
The players believe that courts like these “would also tackle the chronic lack of covered tennis courts in Britain compared to the rest of Europe.”
“Germany operates almost three times as many facilities, while France has more than five times our number,” the letter says.
“With an average of 150 days rain every year in Britain, bad weather and dark winters limits access and reduces participation.”
The LTA in 2019 committed to building “hundreds” of new indoor tennis courts over the following ten years. In its 2023 finance and governance report, it said it had awarded “£8.9m … across 87 projects to help build or improve indoor tennis courts, padel courts, floodlights and outdoor courts.”
Overall, tennis participation is on the up in the U.K., with an International Tennis Federation (ITF) report last year showing that Britain had the highest percentage of its population playing tennis of any of the 199 nations surveyed. Over the five-year period from 2019-2023, LTA data showed adult annual participation (adults playing at least once a year) in Britain grew by 44 percent, to around 5.6 million people, 10 percent of the U.K. adult population at the time. Children’s annual participation grew to 3.6 million — around 40 percent of the population — over the same period.
(Top photo: Glyn Kirk / AFP via Getty Images)
