But Britain cannot simply “pick up a plan” of what others are doing as every country has its own “tennis ecosystem”, says Bourne.<\/p>\n
Lloyd adds: “We’re competing in one of the most internationally elite sports out there and the landscape is vastly different to 40 or 50 years ago in terms of the number of countries which have representation at the top.<\/p>\n
“We’re ambitious, we want to drive for more, but we honestly believe the indicators are positive. We’re moving in the right direction and stronger than where we have been historically.”<\/p>\n
Encouraging more British children to pick up a racquet from an early age is crucial to developing the next generation of stars.<\/p>\n
Draper, Raducanu and Fery – who entered the LTA system at a young age – provide the blueprint.<\/p>\n
There are 4.3m juniors playing tennis annually with 1.9m playing every month, which Lloyd says are both all-time records.<\/p>\n
But there is a concern that a lack of high-level coaching is stunting the development of many more promising talents.<\/p>\n
Bourne admits the UK needs a “higher base” of coaches, adding that one of the LTA’s key strategies is “spending time and effort” on developing them.<\/p>\n
Chris Marshall, a senior performance coach with over 25 years’ experience, fears many youngsters are being priced out of tennis because parents cannot afford quality coaching.<\/p>\n
“To fund a 12-year-old at county level right now requires anywhere from \u00a3500 to \u00a31,000 a month for coaching, travel, and tournament fees,” Marshall, who founded the Young Champs programme to provide free and discounted coaching for children, told BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
“It is a massive, stressful financial barrier that makes the sport a non-starter for the vast majority of British families.<\/p>\n
“We can’t sit around lamenting the lack of British interest in the second week when we are restricting the pipeline that feeds it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But Britain cannot simply “pick up a plan” of what others are doing as every country has its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":837348,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-837347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=837347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/837348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}