Seeking your stories - get published at Real Tennis News
Also announcing live chat coverage of the upcoming US Open and US Ladies Open
Real Tennis News began as an experiment ahead of last November’s British Open to see if there was any appetite for a more regular, journalistic-style reporting of the game. The response has been very positive, especially across the Australian Open in January. There is a big year of real tennis ahead, especially leading into the two World Championships in Newport in May and September.
Today, I am opening up this publication for other people around the real tennis community to help tell the stories in our small game. If you want to support this project, here are three ways to get involved:
Contributors - If you have a one-off story to tell about your club, institution or programme, or maybe you are researching a historical story about real tennis, we would love to hear about it. In particular, if you are constructing a new court or refurbishing an old one, this is a great way to let the world know about any key milestones in your project. Either send us your article, or even just some bullet points and we can get your story told.
Correspondents - To date, the events covered by Real Tennis News have been those I have physically attended, usually writing alongside running the live streaming of the matches. In order to provide the best coverage for all events around the world, we are seeking writers to prepare regular updates from the major tournaments. In particular, we are seeking coverage from Australia and the US, the latter particularly covering the upcoming World Championship series of events.
Photographers - In the event that we don’t have on-the-ground correspondents, we will still provide coverage of the major events, but would be greatly assisted by anybody willing to provide a couple of photographs from the matches. This doesn’t have to be with a fancy camera, just an iPhone will do!
If any of this interests you, please get in touch at ben.geytenbeek@gmail.com or on social media.
In addition, we will be conducting another experiment - utilising Substack’s subscriber chat function. We will be running live discussion and update threads during the latter stages of the US Ladies Open and through the US Open, both later this month. Please say hello over there during the events, it will be great to get a lively discussion going. Note that new chat threads don’t get sent via email, you’ll either need to use the Substack app or check in on the website. In the meantime, I’ve started a trial thread about handicaps and rankings so get your questions in.
Lastly, I was thrilled to appear as a guest on the View From The Hazards podcast with Rob Shenkman and Ben Taylor-Matthews, where we discussed handicaps and the Unofficial Real Tennis World Rankings. If you haven’t yet taken a listen, you can check it out on Spotify.