Disclaimer

This blog reflects personal views and family life only. It does not represent the views of my employer, any professional body, any tennis organisation, or indeed anyone with a functioning checkout page. As always, any references to children other than my own are kept appropriate and respectful. This is a parent’s account of junior sport, mild administrative suffering, and the usual low-grade chaos that seems to follow us around like a badly timed double fault.

After the U9 County Cup there was, briefly, the illusion of calm.

No tournaments lined up. No frantic packing of snacks. No checking whether the weather app was lying. No trying to remember whether this week required red balls, orange balls, green balls, or simply emotional resilience. For one short moment, our son’s tennis calendar looked almost sensible.

Naturally, this could not last.

Last week we could not squeeze in any extra tennis even if we had wanted to, which in our household is quite an achievement. But a quick browse of the LTA tournament website revealed that the machine never really sleeps. A couple of local events caught our eye. First, a Grade 4 in Wellington. Then, later this month, a U10 Grade 6 in Willand, just across the border into Devon.

The Willand event offers no points, which in some circles probably makes it the tennis equivalent of an existential exercise. But for us it is useful. Our son has not played any U10 events at all yet, so it will be a good chance to see how well, or how badly, he gets on with the bigger court and the different demands that come with it. A scientific scouting mission, if you like. With fewer spreadsheets and more forehands.

But before any of that, there was Wellington earlier today.

Or at least there nearly was.

The tournament very nearly did not happen for us, not because of injury, illness, biblical weather, or a racket malfunction, but because the LTA tournament payment page seems to have developed a personal issue with my home computer.

Normally the process is simple enough. Click on the tournament. Click on the relevant age group. Add it to the basket. Proceed to checkout. Exchange money for tennis-related suffering. Everyone moves on.

Except this time, I got to the payment page and then… nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Not an error message. Not a loading wheel. Not even the courtesy of pretending to work. Just a blank refusal to engage, like a consultant replying to an email chain that has become too long and spiritually dangerous.

I tried a few things. Refreshed. Retried. Probably muttered things under my breath that would not make it into an LTA safeguarding document. Eventually I opened a ticket with LTA customer service and now await, at some undetermined point in the future, the answer to one of life’s more pressing questions: why can I not give you my money?

Luckily, we know the organiser, so I sent her the entry fee directly and she paid it for us. A very sensible workaround, though perhaps not the sort of elegant digital pathway one dreams of in 2026.

Even more bizarrely, I later discovered that I could pay on my phone, just not from the home computer. So perhaps the culprit is my antivirus software. Or my browser. Or the alignment of the planets. Or perhaps my desktop has simply decided it does not believe in junior tennis.

Either way, we made it.

And in a rare and suspicious act of kindness, the weather also made it.

It turns out Saturday was the only dry and sunny day in existence, so Wellington got the golden ticket. The courts are conveniently close to the High Street, with parking just around the corner, which is exactly the sort of logistical luxury junior sports parents talk about in hushed tones.

Eight players had entered, so the format was tidy enough: two boxes of four, round robin within each box, top two through to the semi-finals, bottom two playing out positions five to eight. Simple. Brutal. Efficient. Like NHS bed management, but with more isotonic drinks.

Our son found himself in the same group as Millard Lai, Devon number one, and, because the tennis gods enjoy recycling plotlines, Charlie Takle. The final member of the group was Taliesin Kujawski from South Wales, an unknown factor, which in junior tennis usually means either “pleasant surprise” or “absolute menace.”

First up was Millard against our son.

For a first match, it was very decent indeed. Close contest, good rallies, solid serving from both players, and overall the sort of match that reminds you how much these children actually improve between tournaments even when the final standings do not always scream it from the rooftops. Millard’s serve was especially strong and he managed two aces against our son, which at this level is not nothing. On the other hand, our son also produced several very good returns, which mattered because it meant he was not just surviving points but actively building them. In the end, he lost 7–10, but there was plenty in the match to like.

Next came Taliesin Kujawski, the South Wales unknown.

We had watched him in his earlier match against Charlie, which Charlie only won 10–8, so there was clearly no room for complacency. Our son started very strongly and raced into a 5–1 lead. At that point I began to make the classic parental error of assuming things might remain straightforward. That was foolish. A few easier points slipped away after the change of ends and suddenly it was 6–5, which was less comfortable than it had any right to be. Still, he regrouped and closed it out 10–6, which was a good win against a player we had not seen before.

Meanwhile, Charlie lost a close one to Millard, which meant the maths of the group became very clear indeed: our son needed to beat Charlie to reach the semi-finals.

This, sadly for us, did not happen.

Both played well, but Charlie prevailed 10–6 and with that took the semi-final spot. Reasonable match, competitive throughout, but not quite enough from our side when it mattered. That is tennis. One minute you are running probability trees in your head, the next minute your child is in the placing matches and you are pretending that 5th is what you were after all along.

For the next match our son faced Kiera Lavin, the fourth player from the other box and the only girl in the competition. From what I saw, she struck the ball well and looked technically sound, but our son produced one of his better performances of the day and won 10–1. Clean, focused, and pretty controlled throughout.

That result put him into the playoff for 5th place, where he found himself facing Taliesin Kujawski again, after Taliesin beat Joel Fitzpatrick in the corresponding placing match. Joel, of course, was someone our son had played in the County Cup just two weeks ago, so there was at least some familiar local context floating around in the background.

The rematch with Taliesin started superbly. Our son flew into a 9–4 lead at remarkable speed and looked as though he might finish the whole thing with minimal fuss. Which, as regular readers will know, is generally the exact point at which the nerves arrive dressed as uninvited guests.

Taliesin clawed it back to 9–7. Our son suddenly looked unsettled and distinctly unhappy on court. The rhythm had gone. The ease had vanished. For a brief moment it had all the makings of one of those unnecessarily dramatic finishes that parents age visibly during.

Thankfully, he took the next point and closed the match out 10–7.

So that was 5th place overall.

Charlie finished 3rd, while the final was contested by Millard Lai and Sean Adedeji. It was apparently a close affair, with Sean winning in the end before heading off towards Southampton, where he and his Avon team-mates were due to play following their success in Taunton a couple of weeks ago. Junior tennis, as ever, remains a world where children seem to have more travel commitments than lower-league footballers.

And our final thoughts?

Well, the headline result may say 5th, but that does not really tell the full story. Our son continues to improve. That improvement is not always faithfully reflected in finishing position, which is one of the more inconvenient truths of junior sport. But the signs are there.

He is more tournament savvy now. He looks more comfortable in competitive settings. His serve is getting better. His returns against stronger servers are also not bad at all. Most encouragingly, his topspin is developing, and that matters because it is one of the great passports to hitting harder while still keeping the ball inside the court rather than launching it into nearby infrastructure.

His mental side probably remains the weakest area, and that showed again in patches today, especially when closing things out should really have been straightforward. But even there, perspective matters. If you look back over the last 12 months, he has come a very long way.

Which is both encouraging and, from a parental scheduling perspective, deeply inconvenient.

Because it means we will, of course, keep doing this.

Willand awaits. Bigger court. New challenge. No ranking points. Plenty of opportunities for character building, tactical reflection, and further online payment failure.

In other words: tennis continues.