Tennis player Sonay Kartal said it was “great to be back” as she visited her old primary school and met former teachers.<\/p>\n
Ranked 68th in the world, Kartal played on Centre Court at Wimbledon this summer and represented Great Britain in the Billie Jean King Cup during a breakout year in her career.<\/p>\n
Revisiting Saltdean Primary School, she said she still remembers where all the classrooms are and joked that at 163cm she “actually felt big for once”.<\/p>\n
Kirstie Evans, who taught her in Year 3 – 16 years ago – said: “I’ve followed her career, I watched her at Wimbledon, so getting the opportunity to see her again today is just so lovely and I feel like she hasn’t really changed.”<\/p>\n
“She’s still just so down to earth and I think the children in my class have been really inspired by her.”<\/p>\n
The visit was part of the Lawn Tennis Association’s Youth Schools Programme, to promote the sport.<\/p>\n
Kartal said: “When I was here, tennis was kind of a niche sport, it wasn’t that accessible, it was a bit more under the radar, we didn’t have tennis after-school club or lessons in PE.”<\/p>\n
She said the programme is making tennis “more accessible” by improving equipment and courts.<\/p>\n
She said that 30,000 people are now trained to deliver lessons \u2014 a sign the sport is going in the right direction for these kids”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tennis player Sonay Kartal said it was “great to be back” as she visited her old primary school…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323807,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-323806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}