SOLIHULL’S tennis champion Dan Evans joined his Davis Cup team mates on court to inspire young tennis talent ahead of the Davis Cup finals in Madrid next week.
The 29-year-old British number one, who recently rose to 42 in the ATP World singles rankings, teamed up with doubles specialists Jamie Murray and Neal Skupski to run a coaching session for 35 children with the Lawn Tennis Association at the National Tennis Centre in Wimbledon before flying out to the Spanish capital with the UK team.
Many of the children who took part, including several disability players, had also previously been part of the LTA’s Tennis for Kids initiative, which was launched off the back of the team’s historic Davis Cup win in 2015 which Evans was part of.
The program, aimed at tennis players aged four to 11, encourages children try tennis for the first time. Over 83,000 children across the UK, including over 5,000 in Birmingham, have taken part since it was launched.
Evans, Murray and Skupski were also joined by GB Davis Cup captain Leon Smith for a jam-packed hour of tennis games and drills with LTA coaches, giving the kids a chance to play with, and learn from, some of their GB tennis heroes ahead of Great Britain’s first match on Wednesday against the Netherlands.
This year’s competition will see a new format with 18 countries playing in six groups. The winners of each group, along with the two best runners up will go through to the quarter-finals with the semi-finals and final taking place next weekend.
Evans, who will also be joined in the squad by Andy Murray and Kyle Edmund, said: “It’s great to give back to the school kids here and hopefully we can help get more of them involved in playing tennis. The way I started tennis was at sessions like these and it’s great to be out here – hopefully some of them will aspire to be just like the team. Tennis is a great sport, it gets you out and about, it’s very good for your health and people from all kinds of backgrounds are able to play.”
Captain Leon Smith, added: “If we can inspire these young children into tennis and get them involved in the sport then that’s always a positive thing for us to be involved in.
“It’s a new format of the competition so we’re excited to see how it all works, there are 18 of the best teams in the world coming together for one week of competition and it’s going to be really exciting. We’re delighted to have a strong squad ourselves and we’ll be giving it everything for the country.”
