Nicholas Clarke

Out­go­ing pres­i­dent of the Ten­nis As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T Jer­mille Dan­clair says he is con­tent with the progress made by the or­gan­i­sa­tion dur­ing his two-year tenure. Dan­clair made the com­ments ahead of the As­so­ci­a­tion's An­nu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing, which will be held lat­er this month with the goal of elect­ing a new ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Speak­ing this week, the for­mer na­tion­al dou­bles cham­pi­on said that de­spite hav­ing to deal with sev­er­al ob­sta­cles, in­clud­ing fi­nan­cial cut­backs by the Min­istry of Sports, he was sat­is­fied with the state in which he would he would be leav­ing the sport.

"I think that it was very chal­leng­ing and we did the best we could with the con­straints and the re­sources that we had," he said. "We had to scale back on a lot of the things that we had planned to do to get ten­nis mov­ing for­ward... It's at a point now where we can do the ba­sic things, but if we're to ad­vance past that I think we re­al­ly need some more fi­nan­cial sup­port."

Look­ing back on his time in charge, Dan­clair said he was es­pe­cial­ly proud of the na­tion­al women's team's per­for­mance in last year's Fed Cup, in which it nar­row­ly missed out on ad­vanc­ing to the Amer­i­c­as Zone Group One for the first time. Oth­er achieve­ments in­clud­ed the in­crease of in­ter­na­tion­al tour­na­ments played on lo­cal soil, which he felt had con­tributed to­wards im­prov­ing the coun­try's sports tourism ini­tia­tive.

He added that among the as­so­ci­a­tion's top pri­or­i­ties fol­low­ing his de­par­ture would be to en­sure the coun­try's top ju­nior play­ers reg­u­lar­ly played in for­eign tour­na­ments.

"They re­al­ly need some in­ter­na­tion­al ex­pe­ri­ence but its very ex­pen­sive for them to get out there and play on the cir­cuit," he said.

"One of the oth­er chal­lenges, I think is get­ting vol­un­teers in­volved. A lot of what we do is based on peo­ple vol­un­teer­ing their time and ser­vices since we aren't able to pay every­body."

Dan­clair was op­ti­mistic about the fu­ture of the sport in T&T, cit­ing the emer­gence of young­sters such as Scott Hack­shaw, Adam Scott and Em­ma Davis.

"We have a good group of 13 year-olds com­ing up and we're look­ing for­ward to see what they can evolve in­to. We al­ready have a strate­gic plan in place geared to­wards de­vel­op­ment."