UK's biggest indoor women's Tour event makes presence felt
While the world’s best female tennis players battle it out at the WTA Finals in Fort Worth this week, a market town in the UK’s West Midlands is hosting a marquee event of its own on the ITF World Tennis Tour.
The stage may be rather less glitzy at the (very pleasant) Shrewsbury Health and Fitness Club than the showpiece WTA Finals, with which it shares its place in the tennis calendar, but the competition is no less fierce.
World No. 49 Anhelina Kalinina, Wimbledon semi-finalist Tatjana Maria, Olympic silver-medallist Marketa Vondrousova and British star Katie Boulter are all in singles action at W100 Shrewsbury, treating the Shropshire town to top-class tennis capable of inspiring the local community and beyond.
“It’s great for a provincial county town to have an event of this level,” said Dave Courteen, the club’s Managing Director. “Thirty-four local businesses have got involved in sponsoring this event. That shows the commitment of the whole community to get together and make this happen.
“The attendances are amazing too – even for the first day of qualifying we’d sold 110 tickets and the finals are sold out.”
This year’s tournament is a significant step up for the club, which hosted at W60 level in 2019 (and W25 level prior to that) and continues to cater for its 5,500-strong membership alongside the professional tennis event. The logistical challenges involved are easily outweighed by the opportunity it provides – for players and locals alike.
Over 200 schoolkids will attend on Friday to experience elite-level tennis, while a further 110 older students will be taught about careers options in sport outside of being a professional athlete.
“It’s a festival of tennis, and that’s what it’s all about,” Courteen added. “We want to make this not just about the tennis on court, but a whole series of activities off court as well so we get people involved in the game who otherwise would never connect with tennis. I think that’s such an opportunity.”
The tournament, the biggest indoor women’s event on the ITF World Tennis Tour in the UK since the early 1990s, is one of 14 events on offer at ITF W100 level in 2022, with one still to come this year at W100 Dubai in early December.
Tournaments of this stature provide opportunities for rising stars who are on the periphery of the WTA Tour, as well as delivering valuable match-play for higher-ranked players looking for competition.
Tatjana Maria, for one, has proved heavily reliant on events like these over the course of her 22-year-playing career. The 35-year-old German's first big tournament win came on Slovakian soil at W100 Bratislava back in 2007, and she has gone on to win four further W100 events across the globe since then.
A dream run to the Wimbledon semi-finals this year and a current ranking of No. 70 in the world has hardly dampened their value to her.
“They’re super important,” she said. “When I started the Tour, when I was around 20-years-old, we had much more 100k and 80k tournaments. Now it’s a lot of 60ks, and if you want to make a big jump it’s not quite enough I think.
"It’s really important to have these 80k, 100k events - these are important tournaments. If you win them you get really good points and it’s really worth it to play.”
You can watch the live stream of W100 Shrewsbury here, or follow the latest scores on the ITF World Tennis Tour live scores platform.