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KENT OPEN AND KENT SQUASH FESTIVAL: NO RESTING ON OUR LAURELS

KENT OPEN SUCCESS: NO RESTING ON OUR LAURELS

Work has already started on developing next year’s Kent Open and Kent Squash
Festival following the success of this year’s first edition.

The professional tournament, held at The Mote Squash Club in Maidstone, was the pinnacle event of the three-month Kent Squash Festival, which introduced more than 300 school pupils to squash and
racketball.

The quality of play in the PSA One Star tournament produced a week of top-class
entertainment at the Mote and it was great to see spectators
travelling
to watch the action from all over the county.

Funding events like this is always a major undertaking and we are grateful to England Squash and Racketball for their enormous support, with further

sponsorship emerging from Harrow Rackets, Kent SRA and the Shepherd
Neame brewery, plus a number of generous individual donations.

The sponsorship search for 2011 has already begun and a number of solid pledges are already in place.

It was wonderful to see the PSA players willingly giving up time in the afternoons to help coach school children during the daily clinics at
The
Mote and we look forward to seeing a significant growth in the number
of
junior members at squash clubs throughout the county as a result of
this
initiative.

Our major targets for the Open and the Festival were to raise the profile of the

sport through an ongoing publicity campaign and to attract new players

to the sport. We would like to think we achieved both targets but
there
is no resting on our laurels.

Our ambition is to reach every school in the county over the next few years
to attract new players and provide a much larger playing base for our
sport.

I was interested to learn from one of our Egyptian visitors that his home club
in Cairo has around 180 junior members.

That kind of programme is bound to create the kind of competitive atmosphere
responsible for the recent surge in Egyptian squash at all levels.

Those numbers will also sustain a team of full-time coaches, and increasing the number of qualified coaches in the county has to be another of our

priorities as we look to build on this year’s success.

For
English
squash to compete with the likes of Egypt, we need to build our junior

participant base as quickly as possible.
It was interesting, and extremely disconcerting, to see that no British players were in the 32-draw for the current Women's World Junior Championships.
In the not-too-distant future, it is to be hoped that Kent will have at least two players competing in this tournament.
One of our priorities as a county must to be engage with the players and their families to provide whatever assistance we can, in conjunction with England Squash, to enable Elizabeth and Amelia to reach their full potential.
Hopefully there will be other Kent juniors aiming for similar ambitions in the boys' game, and once again we are aiming to provide a support framework for those involved.

KENT OPEN AND FESTIVAL FEEDBACK

One outstanding success from the recent Kent Junior Festival is the news that we now have enough players to form a large under-11 squad, so well done to Steve Franks and Naomi Duthie for some excellent groundwork.
We will continue to comb the county looking for talent if any club would like to nominate players who they feel would benefit from involvement in the squad then please get in touch.

Regarding the Kent Open, I would be keen to hear from any players who might have ideas on how we can improve things for next season, especially with the Festival events leading up to and during the professional tournament itself.
We intend to give racketball a bigger platform next season and my main wish is that all the players who take part in the Festival events actually stay to watch the pros in action, instead of packing their bags and heading home rather than taking advantage of the opportunity of free admission to watch the semi-finals and final of a major world ranking tournament.