Chief executive Blane Dodds revealed Tennis Scotland has offered to help improve the tennis facilities described as a “shambles” by Andy Murray.
The two-time Wimbledon champion’s retort on his Twitter account in which he also tagged in @tennisscotland was in response to a parent’s plea for help to get public tennis courts in East Kilbride, South Lanarkshire, up to scratch.
Dodds was speaking after helping to officially open the state-of-the-art tennis facilities at Argyll Park, Alexandria, which benefited from £200,000 investment from Tennis Scotland, LTA, sportscotland and West Dunbartonshire Council and he told PA news agency that more help is available for facilities all over the country.
“We have been working hard with West Dunbartonshire Council to do as Andy Murray suggested and that is help local authorities and leisure trusts develop their tennis facilities,” he said.
“These facilities have been hit hard and we appreciate that but we are here to help. That is the message today; get in touch.
“We have reached out to the East Kilbride one that Andy has highlighted and we expect to be talking to them about what we can do to help them but we are delighted to see what we can do to help others throughout Scotland.
“I would love to own and operate the facilities but unfortunately we don’t, that’s for the local authorities and leisure trusts throughout Scotland but we want to work with them and we do ask any local authority or leisure trust that has a public tennis facility, please get in touch and we can see how we can help you.
“The LTA have been fantastic in putting resources in place and we, along with sportscotland, have been working closely with them on this project and other projects that we are talking to other local authorities about, so we can actually help develop these types of quality facilities for the community to enjoy, whether that is investment or programming.
“We know the pandemic has perhaps pushed things like sports facilities down the priority list but we are here to help.
“There’s lots of facilities that we have had an interest in and worked through over the last few years.
“Since 2014 there has been £5million invested in tennis facilities through various means, sportscotland, LTA, community funds, so we have been working hard and these facilities exist throughout Scotland because of that but more has to be done clearly.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here