So this week, we have two exciting Presidents! Lets find out more about them...
Luke Williams & Sam Jackson - Tennis
Luke:
I started playing tennis at the age of 11 and I instantly feel in love with the sport, spending hours at my tennis club training with my brothers. After competing in my first few competitions and progressing to the latter stages, I started training with the high-performance team at my tennis club. The intensity was so high that one of the coaches wouldn’t stop the training session until someone was physically sick. Fortunately this didn’t put me off tennis one bit and I got selected for the county cup team. After a couple of years playing tennis tournaments around the country, I finally reached a certain standard to qualify for my first U16’s European tennis event. After experiencing the standard of European and National events, I was hungry for more.
Unfortunately due to multiple injuries occurring while playing these events I stopped playing tennis for a few years as I couldn’t physically continue and I lost the desire to play the sport. After picking up my racket again at 18, I started training and playing for the Clubs Men’s 1st and 2nd teams where I gained promotion with the 2nd’s and helped the 1st’s qualify for the National Club competition. During this time I was playing for CCCU’s 1st team where we gained promotion without losing a game. I found a new passion to play tennis again, by playing for the team and wanting to continue developing the tennis society at CCCU. Working with last year’s committee and this year’s committee, everyone who has been involved has made tennis at CCCU a higher quality standard and helping social tennis grow dramatically.
With both the Men’s and Women’s 1st team currently in the quarter-finals of the cup, the two captains (Ben and Noemi) have been leading by example ever since their first year and continue to strive and improve each individual player. The overall goal for everyone is to win the Cup. After the success of last years varsity win for the Men’s 1st, another team goal this year is to get a clean sweep of all teams beating Kent. This couldn’t have been done without our tennis coach Dr Jon Swain who has been improving and guiding the whole of CCCU tennis throughout my years at CCCU.
As the majority of the committee are in their final year of their undergraduate study, we are all encouraging and providing the current members with the knowledge of what is required to develop the tennis society and hopefully make everyone’s experience as enjoyable as it has been for the previous and current members.
Sam:
Despite first picking up a racket at the age of 9 I didn’t start taking tennis seriously until I joined Christ Church. A lot of this was due to the lax nature of the home club I started at but also personally I’d never had that inbuilt drive to win. Training was always more of a meet up with friends rather than a focused session of improving our tennis ability. However, having a keen interest in sport in general, I stuck with tennis and by the time I joined the university it was the only sports club I could realistically join. At this point I still had never competed competitively, unless you count playing against the elderly members of the home club, and it really showed. I’ll always remember my first match for Christ Church, it was a cup game at Sussex and I lost, badly. In the coming years with the support of the more established players and regular quality coaching I started to improve to the point of actually winning matches. As this continued my input into the club also grew as I was made vice president for my second year and now joint president with Luke in my third. In that time and due to the hard work of the changing committee members the tennis club has tripled in size to more than 30 people. We created a second men’s team that is top of their league aiming for promotion, and thanks to the ongoing commitment of the women’s captain Noemi the hopes for the women’s team have never been higher.
The tennis club has been great for me personally, improving my confidence and enabling me to meet lots of new people. But I’ve also enjoyed at least trying to make it more enjoyable and worthwhile for the current members as the original committee did for me.