JOHANNESBURG - Unveiling his vision for the sport over the next eight years, Tennis South Africa (TSA) CEO Richard Glover admits its revival will take time but is optimistic about awakening the "sleeping giant".
Among the plans are to establish tennis among the five most popular sports in the country and have at least four players ranked in the top 100 in world singles.
Glover spoke about a new TSA which involves former players while also co-opting top business onto its board.
“I refer to it as the new Tennis South Africa partly because of me, but there is also a new board of directors and I also think there is a new energy,” Glover said.
“There is a collective coming together in the tennis community where people are saying to me and other people it is a sleeping giant in the country.
“I really feel there is a ground swell within tennis, a new energy and a vibrancy. There are a lot of people working behind the scenes to resolve the challenges we face.”
TSA will be relaunching the junior national squads for both Under-16s and U18s while the federation also hope to increase their membership base to 50 000 players.
Looking at all aspects of the game, TSA will establish an independent transformation task force to address the low level of development.
“There is no silver bullet to solve that problem; we are probably a number of years behind from where we should be from a development perspective,” Glover said. “If TSA had done its job properly, we would be producing more players of colour and we haven’t done that.”
A high-performance task force that will include former world No 1 doubles player Danie Visser, Olympic doubles silver medallist Pietie Norval, Raven Klaasen and Natalie Grandin will be given the mandate to restructure the high-performance programme.
“They will come together with a group of coaches and over the next two months will be looking at all aspects of high-performance tennis in South Africa,” Glover said.
“One of the things that is really important to the new TSA is to really pull in as much intellectual capital as possible to help transform the sport.”
TSA were also looking to bring back the once acclaimed SA Open, Glover explained.