Peter Lundgren is Great Britain's new Davis Cup coach, according to reports.
this is great news, lets hope it can continue beyond the ukraine tie, but you have to wonder how come now? whats happened to suddnely get the good coaches on board, is it all down to murray, possibly, but also the money has to be coming from somewhere, and with the huge expenditure on the training centre to take into account. Draper sacked a lot of people to start with, but we havent really heard of many new staff, maybe this is where, saving on all those useless wages.
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Count Zero - Creator of the Statistical Tennis Extrapolation & Verification ENtity or, as we like to call him, that steven.
I'd like to know exactly who has gone, and understand what his plans are rather better than I currently do. Have these been published anywhere? I certainly can't criticize him for getting rid of the top layer of LTA coaches, they have achieved nothing in 25 years, with the exception of David Felgate (sacked anyway!) who had the fortune of working with someone extremely talented who's game and mindset had not been polluted by the LTA. With so much money being paid to just two personnel, he is really going have to get maximimum leverage from them.
What will Lundgren's responsibilities be apart from the DC? I really don't think a big name is necessarily going to bring much to British tennis if all they do is captain the DC. Apart from picking the team, a DC captain doesn't do all that much. He has to face the media, supervise some training sessions,l but most players have their own coach anyway. He can make the odd suggestion to a player during a match, but I dont think that that has much influence really. Hopefully he'll be put to good work getting some new coaches up to speed.
I'd like to see Draper instigate some kind of performance measuring system for our top coaches. If you work in any top notch organisation, your performance is always under review. I would also like Draper to encourage british coaches to get foreign coaching qualifications as well as the LTA one. Most coached who I know don't hold the LTA system or the people who teach it in very high esteem . With young Andy Murray bringing life into British Tennis, we are going to have loads more kids picking up rackets, and some of them will turn out to be just as talented as Andy himself. Let us hope that in a couple of year's time we'll have the coaching system in place to give these new youngsters the help they need to succeed.