ITF

The Grenadine island of Carriacou is one of the most beautiful places on earth. A dot in the Caribbean the shape of a forward slash north-east of Grenada, it is less than 12 kilometres in length and barely five kilometres wide, but has glorious sandy beaches, shallow turquoise waters, and colourful coral reefs. What it hasn't got are tennis courts, not a single one. There are a couple of urban- style basketball courts, but they are not well maintained. Yet despite this, at the recent under-12 Caribbean regional team championships held in Tacarigua, Trinidad, the entire Grenada team was made up of youngsters from Carriacou. "Tennis in Carriacou is played on a basketball court with a rope and cones," explains John Goede, the ITF's Development Officer for the Caribbean region. "There are no lines, the kids have cones to indicate where the baseline would be. But thanks to the positive attitude of the coaches, the kids and their parents, we have made extraordinary strides. "We did a 'Play Tennis' course on Carriacou in 2019 when I had coaches in flipflops. Then in the run-up to the 2022 under-12 team championships, the kids from Carriacou won all their trial matches, so they were selected to represent the entire state of Grenada. They are playing marvellous tennis despite only having played the game for about two years. I am so proud of the two boys and two girls who made up the Grenada team, it's wonderful to see how they compete against players from countries with far more facilities and coaches." The Tacarigua tennis centre, a world-class facility of 12 courts (including four indoor courts) built by the Tennis Association of Trinidad & Tobago with help from the government, hosted another team that is testimony to how development efforts in the region are slowly bearing fruit. The island nation of St Lucia has no high- performance coaches, just coaches at grassroots level who have been boosted by the opening of a tennis academy. They have been producing a number of players at basic level, many of them assisted by the ITF's Junior Tennis Initiative (JTI), and they too represented their country at under-12 level in Tacarigua. A region divided by language For tennis purposes, the Caribbean region is something of a mishmash of territories, grouped as much by linguistic heritage as by geographical location. The overall Central American region is known as COTECC, the Spanish abbreviation for the Central America and Caribbean Tennis Confederation, one of the six Regional Associations affiliated to the ITF. Within COTECC there are four sub-regions: Mexico, the Spanish-speaking territories of Central America, the Northern islands of the Caribbean from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean islands south from Puerto Rico. For development purposes, the first two are managed as one unit as they are largely Spanish-speaking, while the third and fourth form a second unit – the Caribbean – as the linguistic heritage is English, French and Dutch. The result inevitably involves some apparent anomalies. Belize on the Central American mainland counts as part of the Caribbean because its colonial history has left it a largely English-speaking country, while Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, which are Caribbean islands, are part of Central America because they are Spanish-speaking. The three Guyanas (Guyana, French Guyana and Suriname) would logically be part of the South American development region COSAT but choose to belong to the Caribbean because their official languages are English, French and Dutch. "There is an old culture of being dependent on the motherland," says Goede, "and that still presents us with a lot of challenges in many countries. The players we come across are as talented as any in the world and have the potential to match. Athletes are influenced by their peers, parents and the community. The support network is vital for each athlete aiming for the top and we work on that too." Another obstacle is that tennis lacks the profile in these island nations that other sports enjoy. Cricket is the national sport of the English Caribbean. Baseball is very popular in the Dutch Caribbean, with many professional league baseball players emanating from Curacao, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. The French Caribbean has a lot of tennis as it profits from several territories that are still officially part of 'mainland' France, such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, St Martin and French Guyana (Gael Monfils's father and mother are from Guadeloupe and Martinique respectively). But tennis is not seen as an elite sport, so youngsters who may be good at tennis but also other sports can easily get lost to another discipline. CARIBBEAN DEVELOPMENT ITF World Summer 2022 33

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