Parks phenomenon still rising from Ashe's concept

On Tennis: In St Anne's Park, on Dublin's Northside, over the weekend, tennis shook off its enduring image of Fred Perry whites and year-round tans, writes Johnny Watterson.

St Anne's was the venue for the final of the Dublin KitKat Parks League, an event that hoovers kids up from all over the place, organises them into competitive bundles and runs off mini-tournaments in various venues. The objective is, obviously, to find a winner, but also to identify latent ability out there on the streets.

The thrust of the programme is to find players who, for whatever reason, are outside the reach of clubs and are therefore lost to the game's national gene pool. Disadvantaged areas, or suburbs where there are just no courts and little incentive for kids to wield a racquet, have been targeted since the mid-to-late 1970s, when the idea was imported from America.

Tom Shelly, who had been on a tennis scholarship in the US, came home with the then-novel concept of Parks tennis. It had been kick-started in the US by none other than the 1975 Wimbledon champion Arthur Ashe, whose own background was far removed from the country clubs. His idea was to find players from the ghettos and inner cities and extend the game's reach.

Indeed Roger Geraghty of Tennis Ireland, who worked in Dublin city's Sherriff Street Parks League in the 1970s and has fond memories of it, remembers Ashe arriving in Dublin to launch the idea.

"It was just after he'd had open-heart surgery and I remember him arriving along to Sherriff Street with his wife, who was a photographer. She was wearing a long, white trench coat and the kids were just hanging out of her, didn't leave her alone. The kids back then may not have ever seen a black person before. It was a great day," recalls Geraghty.

Now Dublin generates about 10,000 tennis-playing kids each year, and there are another 10,000 involved outside the capital. Areas like Sherriff Street, Tallaght, Swords, Walkinstown, Ballyfermot, Fatima Mansions, Mountjoy Square and Pearse Street, none of them known as tennis hot-beds, have competitions. And talent comes through.

Players like James Calhoun, Catherine Lynch, Maria Scanlon, Michael McMahon, Deirdre and Sinéad Walsh and David O'Connell have emerged to win national trophies, while O'Connell was recently part of an Irish Davis Cup squad.

But the great hope of a top-100 player has yet to be realised, possibly because funding is scarce.

Take players of 13 who are talented. Then agree that, according to the established rule of thumb, to get one top player you need to start with a group of 10. It costs about €25,000 a year to keep a 13-year-old in racquets, coaches, strings, shoes, travel and accommodation. Multiply that by 10 and that's €250,000 a year. Over 10 years, which is how long it might take for a player to mature, the figure becomes a rather large €2,500,000.

The blurb to advertise the parks leagues is aspirational, the hope being it might throw up a generation of tennis stars. That has not yet happened, though many have been good enough to follow up scholarships in the USA.

Paul Fitzgerald is one such, an 18-year-old Leaving Cert student from Comeragh Park, The Glen, Co Cork.

He first enrolled in the KitKat Parks Tennis Leagues in St Mark's National School, Cork, at seven years of age. Over the years he has finished first in several national events, and with the help of the federation he won two Irish Tennis Federation (ITF) singles championships in his final year as a junior. He also won the 2005 Irish Open and 2004 National Indoor Championship and was Ireland's number-one under-18 player.

Like most talented Irish players, Fitzgerald has accepted a US scholarship. He is headed for Abraham Baldwin College, Georgia, where he hopes to develop into a professional.

The reality is that coaches nationwide are putting racquets into the hands of over 20,000 kids each year for recreation and are at least making them aware that other sports exist outside the regular diet of soccer and GAA and rugby.

There are more than 60 centres running in Dublin alone during the summer. Even if they provide exercise and recreation in a tennis environment, that can only be good.