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#UniTennis Round-Up – Edition 12

24/08/2018
#UniTennis Round-Up – Edition 12

This is the 12th edition of the #UniTennis Round Up – the bi-weekly update of news stories within British university tennis. Our latest round up highlights some of the activity of university student tennis players in international-level competition and more.

Performance

A huge congratulations to University of Stirling’s Scott Duncan who capped an extremely successful summer of tennis away from university on the ITF Pro Circuit by claiming his first $15K Futures doubles title in Belarus!

Scott, who had a standout 2017-18 university tennis season at both domestic – winning the BUCS National Premier League title – and international – helping the GB University Student team to a historic gold at the BNP Paribas Master’U event in Lille – level, backed up this fantastic result by reclaiming a singles world ranking a week later. In Minsk, he came through qualifying to reach the last 16 eventually losing out to a player with a career high world ranking well inside the top 500!

The summer has seen two further British universities’ athletes reach professional career milestones as University of Bath and Loughborough University number 1-ranked players Ben Jones and George Houghton taste success at ITF Futures level.

Ben recorded his first ATP ranking point of his career in Minsk with a gutsy win in the round of 32 having come through qualifying before falling in the last 16 to a player with a career high world ranking of 600 in three tight sets. This backed up a previous week’s run to the final of the Irish Open Futures doubles final – a great August for Ben leading into the 2018-19 university season.

George Houghton has spent his August playing Futures-level competition in Portugal where he managed to qualify for the main draw in two of three tournaments. The most recent of which, he defeated two current world-ranked players to reach the last 32 of the main draw, losing to an established pro ranked inside the world’s top 900 players.

The excellent level of performance shown by these three #unitennis athletes this summer will go a long way in helping them continue to compete at this level in the British Pro Series events that come to the UK in September.

Alumni

What a brilliant achievement from Loughbrough University alumni Olivia Nicholls who, last week, reached a career high doubles world ranking of 238. This milestone comes as a result of a title-winning 2018 (with four months to go!) as she has four to her name, significantly two at $25k-level. Additionally, this is supported by a fantastic recent run to the final of the ITF $25k Chiswick event with long-time partner Sarah Beth Gray, suffering a tough defeat – 8-10 in the 3rd set match tiebreak.

Read what Olivia had to say about how the British university tennis system supported her to a professional career in tennis here.

#UniTennis at Junior National Tennis Championships 2018

A number of our partnership universities have been promoting their fantastic tennis programmes at British Tennis Junior Nationals at Nottingham Tennis Centre this week.

What a great occasion for the potential university tennis performance players of the future to hear more about the great opportunities available within British university tennis!

We’re now on Twitter!

You can now stay connected with British university tennis whenever and wherever you are – there’s no longer a need to wait 2 weeks for your digest of all things #UniTennis!

Follow @britunitennis on Twitter for regular updates on all things tennis at British universities – from international to recreational-level competition, updates from the fantastic and diverse university tennis clubs within our sector, great stories from our student workforce and much, much more!