Increase tennis courts to make sport more accessible …tennis trainer urges Sports Minister
Founder of Africa Tennis Connect Foundation, Naa Shika Adu, has called on the Sports and Recreation Minister, Mr Kofi Adams, to aid in the construction of more tennis courts to make the sport more accessible.
According to the tennis player and coach, building more tennis courts would lead to getting more players into the talent pool beyond the catchment areas of Osu, Kumasi and Winneba.
She said this in an interview with Citi Sports while celebrating International Women’s Day through her foundation’s Street Tennis Programme that took place at Agege in Accra, in collaboration with DUNK Grassroots- a youth sports development organisation.
“We realised that maybe the one problem when it comes to training young players has to do with grassroots training and also has to do with the centralised tennis players coming from Osu, Winneba and Kumasi. So places where there are tennis courts, bringing out the talents is not much of a problem. The problem is how to get talents in regions without the courts. That has been the problem.”
“My only bit to the Minister for Sports is that we need to make tennis accessible to more communities. Tennis is a nice sport but 99 per cent of the people who play for Ghana are not privileged people, they are not coming from privileged homes…so why are we not making it more accessible to people.”
Naa Shika Adu advocated sports to be part of every young individual growing up.
“Women sports in Ghana amongst social players (18 and above) is growing because a lot of people are getting into working out and staying fit but that is for the social part where you have people who aren’t going to necessarily use the sport as a profession or even to gain admission to college.
“In order for sports to be a part of our society, we need to let sports be part of the kids growing up; so we are not looking at just social players…that’s why we are embarking on the Street Tennis Programme which is mainly for kids and teenagers” she indicated.
