Ricketts making a racket in the tennis world

4:37pm Thursday 10th January 2002

CLAIRE RICKETTS confirmed her outstanding potential at the weekend, claiming the scalps of two of the top juniors in Great Britain en-route to winning the Batchwood LTA Senior Ratings tournament.

Ricketts, 16, had a straight sets victory over Rebecca Dandenya, 17, in the semi final, 6-4, 6-3 and then continued her fine form in the final the following day where she recovered from a set down to defeat the highly-rated and top British Junior Alice Barnes 5-7, 6-3, 6-3.

After losing a close first set, the Parmiters School pupil began to dominate the match with her aggressive attacking play and levelled the match. The third set followed the same pattern as the second with the powerful right-hander dominating play to record a superb victory.

The victory capped a great week, and start to 2002, for Ricketts as her ITF Junior World ranking crept inside the top 150 in the world, at 148, for the first time.

During the coming months, Ricketts will be competing in tournaments home and abroad with her eyes firmly set on moving into the top 100 World Juniors and securing a place at Junior Wimbledon.

With a hectic schedule Ricketts hopes to compete in a handful of Junior Grand Slam tournaments later in the year and will also be entering tournaments in a bid to improve her Senior World ranking of 1214.

Ricketts, who left school last summer to play tennis full time, appears to be in good hands in her bid to fulfil her ambition of playing tennis professionally after her coaches at the highly-acclaimed Batchwood Tennis Academy, Liz Jones and Mandy Franks, were recently voted joint LTA Coaches of the Year.

The pair, who are head professionals at Batchwood ITI in St Albans, have been involved in British tennis for the last 18 years, producing a number of international standard players and the duo were obviously delighted to have won the award.

"We are thrilled to have won the LTA Coach of the Year Award," said Mandy. "Liz and I have worked very hard with the team at Batchwood Tennis Centre to develop the successful junior programme we have there today."

As team captains, Mandy also captained the Herts under 18 boys team to the British County Championship while Liz captained the Batchwood under 15 girls team to the British Club Championship.

Batchwood ITI has also won a number of awards under the guidance of their head professionals for the strength and depth of the tennis development programme which was initiated by Mandy and Liz in 1988. Last year, the duo also dedicated much of their time in passing on their experience and grooming a team of trainers in order to sustain the future success of the club.

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