Minister of Sport Anil Roberts feels that it is necessary for the country's top tennis players to have an indoor facility on which to train because of the unpredictable weather in T&T. Roberts made the statements in response to criticism surrounding the construction of a $140million national tennis Centre in Tacarigua, which will include, a number of indoor and as well as outdoor courts. "I have seen some criticism saying why build indoor courts, but you have to understand. We've just gone through, earlier this year, the dry season that was not dry. We only had about two weeks dry. so when you have tennis players that can only play outdoor, you cannot play tennis in the rain, it's like cricket. so if everyday you have to reschedule practice that will impact on their ability to turn professional so those who don't understand that training and the amount of contact hours a coach has with the athlete and knowing what time you're going to train and being consistent is the most important thing so we are having nine, ten months of rain so we need indoor courts for our best tennis players to really perform so that is the point that they missed.
Of course we are going to continue to build outdoor courts in the community to increase the critical mass in tennis but for the best ones, and we have a crop of young players, you know Breana Stampfli, De Silva, Delancey we have a whole heap the names just go on and on but they need to get the coaching hours, the contact time and to train consistently. It's not just about playing tournaments and playing matches to become a professional tennis player. "We already have a few young players in the elite development programme, off the top of my head we have Breana Stampfli, Gisele Salandy and a few others. As they apply we will give them funding and hope that we will be able to get into the top 40 in the world in junior world so that they could move up to elite funding.
"We do it by a case by case basis, everybody makes their case, shows their ranking and what they have been doing and so on because tennis is very difficult, very expensive sport but we have a lot of talent especially in Tobago right now, the coaching has been doing very well."
