Desperately seeking Venus

School tennis is being revolutionised by a scaled-down version of the game - mini-tennis. Could this be what is needed to foster the Wimbledon champions of the future? Hilary Wilce reports

Anyone for tennis? No thanks. Until recently, that pretty much summed up tennis for young people in Britain. Unlike other nations, we have completely failed to nurture our talent. Unless you were a gilded prep-school child, whose family belonged to a tennis club, your chances of having anything to do with the game, let alone turning out to be the next Tim Henman, were virtually nonexistent. Your primary school wouldn't teach you the basics, your secondary school wouldn't offer it in games, and even if you were enterprising enough to seek out public courts, you would probably find the netting torn up and the surfaces littered with dog mess. Not much chance of a Venus or Serena Williams emerging from that environment.

That is slowly changing, as the children of Lauriston Primary School, in Hackney, bear out. On the hottest day of the year, a Year 6 group run around their small tarmac playground warming up for their session with tennis coach Christian Coombs. They then play a game that involves bouncing the ball on their rackets and passing it on to team-mates before aiming it over the net. The rackets are small, the net portable, and the balls light. It isn't tennis as adults know it, but despite the heat the children are concentrating well and enjoying themselves.

"Some of us play it at playtime, too," says Aron Barnes, 11. "They put out the cones and the net for us. I also go to Victoria Park and play it with my mum. I like it a lot."

Schools don't have to have tennis courts to teach tennis, according to Coombs, a former pupil, who is employed by the school to run an afternoon of coaching each week, plus an afterschool club on the public courts in the nearby park. "You can learn racket skills, and do strokes over a mini-net," he says. With young children you're working on things like hand-eye co-ordination and you might not even use the rackets until the last session." In fact, he says, tennis is a hard game for beginners, and young children can be put off by being put on to a proper court.

The school has recently taken up a mini-tennis programme devised and launched by the Lawn Tennis Association last year, and seen by many as the best hope for attracting a wide spread of new youngsters into the game. Short tennis of various kinds has been around for years, but this is a much more co-ordinated effort than anything that has gone before, with a network of national coaches, an inter-club league, and a "traffic light" progression through different levels.

Children start on a tiny red court, using a sponge ball, and progress on to orange and green courts. Lauriston School, which has just bid successfully for a landscape improvement grant, plans to use part of the money to paint two red courts and an orange one on its playground, thereby sealing its commitment to the sport.

"The children benefit enormously from doing it," says the head, Heather Rockhold. "It's good aerobic exercise, it fits into our 'healthy school' programme, and it broadens their horizons." Like any sport, it also fosters self-discipline and allows children to develop their talents – pupils are already playing inter-school games.

"Both boys and girls love it, and it goes across the whole ethnic range," she adds. "We've seen a huge burgeoning of interest."

According to the LTA, the mini-tennis programme is booming. There are now nearly 35,000 regular players in the country, 500 clubs with mini-tennis programmes, and almost 1,500 primary schools linked to those clubs.

Lauriston's involvement in this traditionally suburban sport is thanks to a vigorous local children's programme developed by Jan Coombs, a former PE head at a local secondary school (and mother of Lauriston's school coach, Christian), who runs the thriving Clissold Park Junior Tennis Club in a nearby park, and has five coaches working in local primary schools. The club, which started with 20 members three years ago, took off like a rocket, and now has more than 700 children on its database. It set out to be accessible, affordable and enjoyable, mixing an open-door policy with opportunities for children to develop their skills, and has uncovered a lot of untapped talent. It is perfectly possible, says Coombs, to find three outstanding players in just one primary class.

"Everything we do is based on the kids," she says. "I feel very strongly about inner-city children getting opportunities, and it seemed to me that starting with them was the only way to do it. Kids ought to be able to get this sort of opportunity wherever they live. There are more people involved in the game now, but I still think it will take a long time. At present it's still too hit and miss." Roger Draper, the director of development for the Lawn Tennis Association, agrees. For years the Association came under fire for being part of the smug tennis establishment, and it still has its critics. Only two weeks ago, the combative former tennis star David Lloyd publicly lambasted its members as "morons", who were spending millions but still failing to find the new Henmans.

But Draper claims that the Association has undergone a complete sea change in the last three years and is "turning around 100 years of neglect." Instead of spending a tenth of its £30m budget on development as it used to, it now spends over half. "And we're no longer working from the top down. We've realised that if we are to grow the game in this country we need to start at the local level."

Much of this means encouraging existing local tennis clubs to be more friendly to new players, including children (the "hang-around factor" is vital, says Draper), and it is currently running its annual three-month Play Tennis initiative, which encourages people to try the game for free at 1,000 signed-up tennis clubs. There are also 17 programmes in a new initiative designed to bring tennis to city areas, while 44 sports colleges have tennis as a focus sport.

But not many other secondary schools are likely to take up the game, according to John Matthews, the chief executive of the Physical Education Association, and a former head of PE. "The problem is that tennis is an expensive act to run. Every child needs a racket, and rackets break. Tennis balls get lost. And if you're lucky you might have three or four courts, but with classes of 30 the logistics are difficult. Short tennis is another matter altogether. That's a real success story."

The future, he says, as with all sports, has to be in developing closer club-school links, and the LTA is confident these are already being built. But Jan Coombs wonders just how easy it will be. She knows that developing a successful children's tennis programme is a lot of hard work. Despite her club's overwhelming success, it has been unable to find anyone willing to fund a full-time administrator; it runs almost entirely on Coombs's virtually full-time voluntary commitment.

She has the reward, however, of seeing new talent being uncovered, and knowing she has changed the lives of city youngsters who get hooked on the sport. "There is definitely a thing called 'the tennis bug', which, once it happens to you, you just can't put it down. It's not just the game, it's the skills, the tactics, the mental approach, the whole thing. It can get to you on every level."

Ten-year-old Tamsin Quigley, a pupil at Lauriston school, and one of her club's under-11 girls performance squad members, agrees. "I just liked the look of it," she says, "and my mum wanted me to get fitter, so I went up to the club. And I like it there. I like meeting new people. I like all the coaches. I like everything about it. I look forward to tennis all the time."

education@independent.co.uk

New balls please: tips for tennis parents

* Understand that learning tennis is a long-term process. Up to the age of 10, children need to learn the basic skills of agility, balance, co-ordination, speed, throwing and catching.

* Find a tennis club offering mini-tennis, or ask your school to consider offering it as part of their PE programme. (Volunteer to get information and help to set it up, if the school shows an interest.)

* Make sure children play mini-tennis at the stage appropriate to them, and that the balls and rackets are the right ones.

* Play ball games of all different kinds with them.

* Be patient. Children progress in peaks and plateaux.

* Encourage your child to take part in informal mini-tennis competitions.

* As a spectactor, applaud both sides. Never turn a blind eye to bad on-court behaviour.

* Be supportive, but do not become the worst kind of "tennis parent".