Welcome to the 2025 summer tennis season! We hope you've all had time to get in a good break over the past couple of months. Now we are into February it seems as though the weather is starting to finally settle which will allow for people to get back out on the tennis courts.
Over the holiday period there were a few players competing at various tournaments around the country.
It was a thrill to see Isaac Becroft a former Miramar player win the Wellington Open (singles and doubles) as well as earning a wild card to the ASB Classic and performing extremely well against a much higher ranked touring pro.
Eddie Sykes competed in the Aotearoa Maori Tennis championships and won both the singles and doubles titles in the 30+ age group!
It was also great to see a large cohort of players over at the recent Martinborough grass court doubles tournament held earlier in mid Janurary. A number of the Miramar teams made it to their respective Semi Finals however a big congratulations goes to Steph Walker and Ronan Avery who were able to go one better reaching the final and winning the title! Tennis was the winner on and off the court that weekend.
Interclub
Interclub has started off with a bang in nice warm weather and we had some really good results from all teams in round 1. Our Premier 1 Men's team led by the touring pro Finley Hall, performed exceptionally well beating or arch rivals Avalon 5-1 to pick up thir first win of the new season. We wish Finley all the best as he now heads off to compete in ITF tournaments in Australia and Asia.
There were also some great examples of dogged fight and resilience with many games being decided in the third set. John Foreman really tested the boundaries of stamina battling for a whopping 4 hours to overcome his Men's 2 singles opponent!
Needless to say there will be a few tired legs around today but good motivation to get tennis fit for the rest of the season.
Committee Meetings
We held our first Committee meeting of the year on Monday, 27 January and have quite a few things to update members on;
New Coach
As many of you will already have seen from our coaching emails or Facebook posts, we are delighted to welcome our new Coach, Baptist Maillet. Baptiste joins us from France and will be taking over from Blake, who is returning to Australia to pursue his teaching qualifications.
Private lessons and coaching courses for Hot Shots, Youth Beginner, Rise Up and Active Tennis classes are available to book on our website. Baptiste will be adding further classes as he settles in. He can also be contacted directly to arrange private lessons. baptiste35740@gmail.com or 020 4185 3563
As Baptiste is getting up to speed and as a way to introduce him to the membership base we are going to offer free Active classes this week and next. (Monday, Feb 3 and 10th)
Don't delay and book now as spots are limited to 8 per session
Check out https://clubspark.kiwi/miramartennisclub/Coaching for more details.
Community Play
And while we're on the subject of sessions for juniors, Community play will start on 14 February this year, because we LOVE tennis (get it?). We figured that lots of people will be away on February 7th because of Waitangi Day on Thursday 6th. As ever, keep an eye out on our facebook page for updates.
Constitution update - IMPORTANT PLEASE READ!
As many of you will know, all incorporated societies have to update their club constitutions to meet the requirements of new legislation and re-register by April 2026. We will be working on this throughout this year, with the aim of putting a revised constitution to members at our AGM in August. (All revisions have to be approved at a General Meeting).
It is really important that members are aware of this process and, to the extent possible, to participate in it. Tennis Central is starting to run forums that clubs can participate in and Tennis NZ have created a club constitution template that is compliant with the new legislative requirements. However, there is still a fair bit of flexibility to adapt the template to the needs of our own club.
We would really appreciate 3-5 members to work alongside the committee over February/March/April to help prepare a draft constitution that we can put to all members for consultation in June/July.
A good starting point for information about these change is Tennis NZ's Modernising Tennis Hub https://tennis.kiwi/clubs/plan/
If you would like to be involved in this process, please contact Aidan Burch, Club Secretary at miramartennis@xtra.co.nz
A couple of smaller points:
Just a reminder that the upstairs of the clubhouse is separately bookable by members. So if you need to escape, wind down, play a bit of table tennis, head to the booking page.
Neil is on the lookout for a couple more people to add to his lawnmowing roster. If you have half an hour every once in a while to help out, please get in touch.