A teenager who, his dad says, “sacrificed” a chunk of his childhood to fulfil a dream of playing at the National Under-14s Boys’ Finals is preparing to serve at Wimbledon.<\/p>\n
Rowan Thornborough, from Allithwaite, near Grange-over-Sands in Cumbria, is heading to the famous south London courts to compete next month.<\/p>\n
The 13-year-old said he had wanted to achieve this since he took up the sport six years ago and was “really looking forward to it”.<\/p>\n
Dad Michael Thornborough said the tournament had been the aim for the past four years and he was “immensely proud” of his son.<\/p>\n
“It’s just been a dream and we’ve made it. I can’t believe it,” the 57-year-old said. <\/p>\n
“We’ve got to this stage to go and do probably the best thing any child could want to achieve. It’s just amazing.”<\/p>\n
Rowan qualified for the finals following “tough” games at Kendal Tennis Club.<\/p>\n
“I felt loads of pressure,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I had to play against some of my friends who I’d never actually beaten before.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A teenager who, his dad says, “sacrificed” a chunk of his childhood to fulfil a dream of playing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":700331,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-700330","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\/700330","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=700330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/700331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}