A good number of tennis coaches and assistants attended the meeting organised for them earlier on this week by the Malta Tennis Federation.

MTF President, Tony Cilia Pisani, whilst thanking those present for attending, said that such a meeting had been long overdue. Its main purpose was to evaluate and regulate the coaching system in Malta.

This would form part of a database collating comprehensive information about all facets of tennis in Malta.

The next step would be to organise a coaches’ symposium which would then lead to the setting up of a system which would see the MTF awarding coaching levels to applicants after they sit for a related examination.

The main tennis bodies, that is, the International Tennis Federation and Tennis Europe have shown their willingness to help the MTF reach its objectives in this field.

Once the coaching system is better organised, the MTF intends to go on tackling tennis from grassroots level and eventually moving up to re-organise the whole set-up.

Another step would be to engage a tennis co-ordinator who would monitor Maltese tennis activities both locally as well as abroad.

Cilia Pisani also mentioned the introduction of the ‘Play and Stay’ tennis coaching method which was very popular abroad and was enticing many a new player to the game In the near future it was planned to introduce it to Malta, on a large scale.

The President’s speech was followed by a presentation on tennis coaching by national coach Rob Tarpey.

The latter underlined the MTF’s commitment for the education and development of the Maltese Tennis Coaches with a brief presentation on the “long term development of tennis players.”

The main content of the presentation was that tennis coaches should recognise that young players have “windows of development” and that it is important that the tennis coaches are trained to develop our players to reach their true potential.

Robert Tarpey said “that the education of coaches is the most important area. To build better players we must have well trained and dedicated coaches”.