Smashing End to an Ace Season!
Bancroft’s School’s Tennis Club has been thriving this year, resulting in record attendance figures, and the cream on the tennis strawberries was added by Removes Phoebe Collins and Emily Lord winning the U13 Invitational East Region Tournament.
The tournament was held at Queenswood School in Hertfordshire on Thursday 20 June and involved schools with a strong tennis tradition including hosts Queenswood, Culford, High Wycombe, St Albans and New Hall. The elite event involves highly rated LTA players and whilst Phoebe (with an impressive 6.2 rating) is experienced in such company, for Emily (10.2 rating) it was a real challenge; however, she managed to hold her own! The format saw the girls first play two singles matches against each school and, in the event of a 1-1 draw, a "shoot-out" doubles tiebreak was played. The Bancroft’s pair came first in their round robin group and in the final they took on Culford, a School with a very strong tennis reputation. Phoebe's experience showed through as she annihilated their number 1 player, 4-0 4-1. Although Emily put up a really good fight against Culford’s number 2 player, who is ranked 3 rating levels higher, she couldn’t quite snatch the win. So the girls faced a doubles tiebreak, quite clearly the underdogs. In theory, Culford should have emerged the winners with their combined power and experience but, after a productive team talk, the Bancroft’s pair, with some "interesting" doubles tactics, emerged as the champions with a 10-7 tiebreak win! Although Bancroft’s had won the U15 Regional event 10 years ago we had never won an U13 title in this tournament so the Collins-Lord partnership made a little bit of Bancroft’s history.
Other Bancroft’s girls who took part in the tournament included Caroline Hubbard, Hannah French, Hareni Ayadurai and Charlotte Rogers (all U13), Tanisha Schumacher, Ella Day, Becky Sayer, Amelia Collins, Genevieve Sundaresan and Elora Gandhi (all U15), Head of Tennis Mandy Wainwright said that “the Bancroft’s girls played splendidly It was a terrific day of tennis.”
