15th August 2024
Kutlo Motseta
On Monday Botswana Tennis started its annual International Tennis Federation (ITF) junior tournament, in which it hosts the international tennis community at the Notwane Tennis Courts near the Botswana National Stadium.
Amongst the countries that will be present are Namibia, Zambia, Great Britain, India, Czechoslovakia, Russia and Portugal.
It’s a J30 tournament which also gets used to accumulate points international rankings and to qualify for major junior championships such as Wimbledon, The United States Open, Australian Open, French Open etc.
The highest ranked local player, is second seeded Naledi Ranguin, who is based in France where she is focusing on her professional career.
Denzel Seetso who is becoming a star player, is based in the United States of America, where he was on a sports high school scholarship and still deciding where to go for university.
Tournament director Matshidiso Malope, said “the aim is to get them (athletes) to all go to College (university) and hopefully play professional tennis”.
He said that the “tournament preparations have gone very far”, but that “there is a lot that has to be done to raise Botswana’s international standard in comparison to its international counterparts. [The primary] challenge being resources to fund players to play in [international tournaments]. If the kids are not well off have to send them to South Africa, which costs about R30 000 a player”.
Thus, though entry barriers entries are high in the sport, there is an effort to make it more accessible to the public. Career international tennis players are typically home schooled as they spend the year on the road, travelling to play tournaments internationally. They can often be seen studying at the tennis courts catching up on home work.
There are two tournaments which will run back-to-back for two weeks, the second one will run between the 19th and 24th August and is a J60 graded tournament which offers more points than the J30 tournament.
Botswana has three certified ITF officials. Gaone Poane just returned from the Olympics where she officiated in the final in the Djokovic’s’ final career match.
