The Ten­nis As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T or Ten­nistt as it is more com­mon­ly called, was se­vere­ly hit by news that the Na­tion­al Rac­quet Cen­tre (NRC) which falls un­der its care, was rel­e­gat­ed to a step-down fa­cil­i­ty for COVID-19 pa­tients.

This new de­vel­op­ment came on Tues­day, amidst a con­tin­u­ing in­crease in the COVID-19 cas­es and deaths dai­ly.

Ear­li­er on Tues­day, the East­ern Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (ER­HA) is­sued a re­lease in­form­ing mem­bers of the pub­lic that, ef­fec­tive from Wednes­day, the Na­tion­al Rac­quet Cen­tre in Tacarigua, will not be avail­able as a COVID-19 Mass Vac­ci­na­tion Site, there­by send­ing re­lief among the ten­nis fra­ter­ni­ty, which had been starved of ten­nis ac­tion.

How­ev­er, lat­er Tues­day ER­HA of­fi­cials sought to rec­ti­fy the in­for­ma­tion by mak­ing it clear the fa­cil­i­ty had been rel­e­gat­ed to a step-down fa­cil­i­ty.

Ten­nistt, un­der pres­i­dent Hay­den Mitchell, has been work­ing on the over­all up­grade of the sport and its stake­hold­ers over the past years, and ac­cord­ing to Mitchell, while they have re­ceived a blow, they thor­ough­ly sup­port the gov­ern­ment's plan dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

"The ten­nis as­so­ci­a­tion re­al­ly do sup­port all the work that the gov­ern­ment is do­ing, we un­der­stand that lives and liveli­hoods come first and that we'll con­tin­ue to sup­port what­ev­er ini­tia­tives that the gov­ern­ment and the min­istry of health put in place for the cit­i­zens of T&T.

"With re­spect to the plans for Ten­nistt, it is a blow be­cause we have two things hap­pen­ing as we speak. Right now we're work­ing with the ITF to make here an ITF-cer­ti­fied bronze train­ing cen­tre and part of that cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is for the ITF team to come down to Trinidad and view our fa­cil­i­ty, au­dit the fa­cil­i­ty, au­dit the sys­tems and process­es that we have in place."

Ac­cord­ing to Mitchell: "While we're able to do some work in the back­ground, whether it's the staffing and cre­at­ing the poli­cies, a lot of the work has to do with what we have in the fa­cil­i­ty. So that will ham­per or de­lay it.

"The sec­ond thing is that in 2019, we had one of the most suc­cess­ful years in ten­nis his­to­ry in terms of host­ing events, where we had sev­en in­ter­na­tion­al events host­ed down here by ten­nistt, and you would imag­ine what that brings in. What we're do­ing is bring­ing peo­ple down to T&T and we suc­cess­ful­ly did that in 2019.

"Right now we're cre­at­ing our cal­en­dar of events and the aim of ten­nistt is to have an in­ter­na­tion­al event, whether it's train­ing, whether it is host­ing an event, whether it is a na­tion­al train­ing, all these things, we're go­ing to have events to bring peo­ple in­to T&T every month of the year.

"So I want to imag­ine how much for­eign ex­change will be gen­er­at­ed by this from the spin-off, talk­ing about sports tourism and all these things.

"So while we do sup­port the gov­ern­ment, we do sup­port what is hap­pen­ing, we see the cas­es ris­ing, on the oth­er side. It means we will have to make al­ter­na­tive plans as far as pos­si­ble."

On the court of play, Mitchell al­so said play­ers will get the op­por­tu­ni­ty to im­prove their rank­ings.

"You would have seen the suc­cess of a lot of our ju­niors and that didn't start overnight. It took about four years to get them where they are.

"The way ten­nis works, is that you must have ac­cess to tour­na­ments to in­crease your rank­ings, so for in­stance, by Trinidad host­ing tour­na­ments here, we're able to put our ju­nior or se­niors right in­to the main draw and that gives them a chance to im­prove their world rank­ings. If they have to go out­side, as is nor­mal­ly the case, they would not get in­to the tour­na­ments and their world rank­ings would not im­prove.

"So it's in our best in­ter­ests to try and host as many tour­na­ments here."