A MASSIVE summer of local tennis came to a close last Friday, with the Swan Hill Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club hosting the Swan Hill Open and Junior Event.
With 344 players, 600 tournament entries and 835 matches played over four days, the annual event was again hailed a raging success by organisers.
It comes on the back of the biggest summer in the history of the club, which also hosted the 2023 Seniors Tennis Championships and ITF Australian World Tennis Masters in January, as well as the Swan Hill International Pro Tour event in February.
SHLTCC president Christian Devlin told The Guardian that while it had been the busiest four months in the club’s history, last week’s annual tournament started it all.
“We had record entries and an enormous number of players from South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria descend on Swan Hill for a competition that was started about 10 years ago now,” Devlin said.
“The Swan Hill Open was the tournament that kick-started all of these other events coming to Swan Hill.
“It’s the foundation tournament that put us on the map and has given us access to all the other tournaments because we’ve hosted it so well in the past.
“It’s usually held in the week preceding Easter and falls at the perfect time, because there’s not a lot of other tournaments on the calendar being played and, because we have such a big facility, we can get through the matches really quickly.”
With both junior and open events on offer, the tournament provided an opportunity for players of all ages to compete on one of the few large-scale grass-court complexes in the country.
No.1 seed Chanchai Sookton-Eng took out the open men’s singles title with a comfortable 6-1, 6-0 victory over Jackson Varney in the final, while Isabella Crossman had a similar result in the open women’s singles, defeating Bianca Duff 6-1, 6-2.
With the club showing its capacity to host many large-scale events in such a short period, it may not be the last time we see tennis take centre stage in Swan Hill, with Devlin confident that more events could be around the corner.
“This summer’s been like nothing our club’s ever experienced, with good-quality tournaments and a new group of players coming to our town.
“Country Week is great, but its predominantly the same people every time we host it, where as with the Australian Masters, the Pro Tour event and this tournament, we’re bringing people to our region who have never been here.
“We received really good feedback from Tennis Australia, who are keen for us to host more tournaments in the future – there’s only 11 Pro Tour events of that nature in Australia every year, and we’re one of very few clubs that can host a large-scale tournament on grass, which is a grand slam surface.
“The dialogue we’ve had with Tennis Australia recently has been really positive towards our club and what may be possible in the future.”
