{"id":687324,"date":"2026-07-12T08:08:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T08:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/687324\/"},"modified":"2026-07-12T08:08:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T08:08:08","slug":"telford-teenage-tennis-star-to-play-for-ghana-in-major-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/687324\/","title":{"rendered":"Telford teenage tennis star to play for Ghana in major event"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">A teenage girl from Telford is due to represent Ghana at a major tennis tournament in Africa next week.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">16-year-old Gwen Klu, from Hadley, will play for the West African country in the Billie Jean King Cup, which will be played in Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">She was inspired to pick up a racket when a tennis coach came into her primary school, offering the opportunity to play at Telford Tennis Centre.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Klu said she felt &#8220;honoured&#8221; for the opportunity and hoped to set a good impression so she could get more opportunities in the future.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Klu has also been playing at the Ellesmere Tennis Academy for three and a half years, regularly representing Shropshire&#8217;s county teams.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">She is eligible to play for three countries, as she was born in the UK, her dad is a former Ghanaian volleyball player and her mum is from France.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">After performing well and achieving an ITF junior world ranking, she was noticed by the West African country and ultimately chose to represent them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Ghana gave me the opportunity first so I just took their their call,&#8221; Klu said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I feel like this is quite a good experience and good opportunity to be able to travel different countries in Africa and also to discover the cultures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A teenage girl from Telford is due to represent Ghana at a major tennis tournament in Africa next&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":687325,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-687324","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\/687324","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=687324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/687325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}