“Tennis,” a head coach from a prestigious club in Surrey casually remarked to me, “will never have a Marcus Rashford.” The throwaway comment was made at a sparsely attended coaching forum on diversity in tennis in 2022. Less than six months later, I was at Surrey’s under-9 girls’ county cup with nine-year-old Sabein Weldegebriel, whose mother is from Ethiopia. I coach her in a park next to a south London council estate.
Sabein’s success at getting to county level should give me hope that the head coach was wrong, but having been in this sport for 20 years, it is hard for me not to agree with him. Why? Because the costs of becoming a professional tennis player are prohibitive to most kids, and the tennis establishment does very little to nurture talent in the way sports like football do.
