Sport England has declared that the Lawn Tennis Association’s four-year plan for increasing the number of people playing tennis is not strong enough, and has put some of its funding on hold.
The LTA recently reported that 445,100 people in England played tennis for at least 30 minutes in 2012, up from 375,000 in 2011 (about a 19 percent increase), but still Sport England was not convinced that the organization has a good grip on how to continually increase the numbers. While 2012 numbers are up, they are still down from 2009, when 530,900 people were playing at least 30 minutes a week.
Tennis’ overall funding will go down from $39.7 million dollars to $28.1 million for the 2013-17 period, although the LTA has a chance to recapture the lost funding in the future.
“Tennis has not performed well in terms of participation and is broadly flat though it got a bit of bounce in the latest figures,” the Daily Telegraph reported Sport England chief executive Jennie Price saying. “Their plan simply wasn’t strong enough to justify the four-year investment. Our hope with tennis is that they do access the full four years. They have only a one-year award for participation and they have to improve their plan for growing participation. The current plan doesn’t have a good delivery plan across the country, there is not a good feedback mechanism, it is not really based on customer insight.”
The LTA responded that it is “working closely with Sport England to ensure that we develop the best tennis offers to increase participation.”
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