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Tennis player Akiel Duke. – Newsday File Photo/Angelo Marcelle
In celebration of San Fernando City Month, San Fernando Tennis Club will host a one-day Juniors and Open tournament at Skinner Park on November 29, from 9 am.
This year, the club, described as the oldest active club based at Skinner Park by senior member Patrick Charles, aims to highlight two of its standout players who both featured at the Davis Cup (Americas) level, Akiel Duke and Kino Francis.
Charles said over the club’s more than 62-year existence, which generated multiple champions across an array of local formats, Duke and Francis have stood out across the new generation of players.
A past University of TT (UT) Patriots Tennis student-athlete, Duke is a 2019 Shell Tranquility men’s singles champion, who graduated from the tertiary institution with a National Engineering Technician Diploma (NETD) in mechanical engineering in 2019.
In 2020, he founded his sports organisation Duke’s Tennis Academy, currently based at Heritage Petroleum, Pointe-a-Pierre.
The left-handed (double-handed backhand) Duke, 31, played his first Davis Cup match as a junior back in 2014, with his most recent appearance at this level in 2023.
Likewise, Francis began his journey at the San Fernando Tennis Club, where he has been a member since the very first day he picked up a racquet.
Raised in Embacadere, San Fernando, Francis developed through the local tennis pathway and went on to represent TT, laying the foundation for a lifelong career in the sport.
His passion for player development led him into coaching, where he quickly made a national impact. Francis served as the Junior Davis Cup coach in 2023 and 2024, guiding TT to back-to-back second-place finishes—the highest results ever achieved by the country in the tournament’s history.
In 2025, he further contributed to the nation’s junior success by coaching the boys U14 World Juniors team to a fourth-place finish.
Francis also played a key role at the senior level, working as an assistant coach for the TT men’s Davis Cup team in 2024, supporting the development of the nation’s top competitors.
Nowadays, he continues to shape future champions through his tennis academy, Kourtside Konnection, where he is dedicated to developing young talent and expanding opportunities for youth in the sport.