Tennis Plaza Cup wrap; Puig competes in Fed Cup; Mountford Leaves LTA
My weekly post today at The Tennis Recruiting Network is a wrapup of the Tennis Plaza Cup. One of the winners, 14-year-old Monica Puig, the girls' 16s champion, was named to Puerto Rico's Fed Cup team and has been in Colombia, where the Americas Zone Group 1 round robin is taking place. Puerto Rico is 2-0, having swept Paraguay and Uruguay the past two days and Puig saw action in doubles against Paraguay. Next up is Brazil, also 2-0 and that tie will decide who gets the opportunity to play the winner of the Colombia-Canada match in the other round robin for a spot in the World Group II competition in April. The (sometimes incomplete) results are here.
Bill Mountford, the former director of tennis at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, has announced his departure from the LTA, less than a year after accepting the position as head of Coach Relations and Competition in Roehampton. Head of the LTA, Roger Draper, had a brief announcement about Mountford's resignation on the LTA's website.
But Neil Harman of The Times gives a little bit more insight into Mountford's decision. Near the end of a story on Andy Murray's decision to withdrawal from the British Davis Cup tie in Argentina, Harman writes:
The news follows hard on the heels of the departure from the LTA of Bill Mountford, who was imported from the United States to oversee the junior development and coaching structure pinpointed by Stuart Smith, the LTA president, as “our No 1 priority” in his annual address last month.
Mountford’s shock move is the highest-profile departure from the Tennis Leadership Team established after Roger Draper’s return to the LTA as chief executive from Sport England two years ago. In his brief tenure, during which he had hardly begun to scratch away at the surface of his enormous task, Mountford had earned huge respect for his diligence, knowledge and approachability.
Where his decision to depart – for undisclosed reasons, although he was said to be increasingly at odds with what he perceived as a lack of direction – leaves the governing body is anyone’s guess. The development of a structure in which coaches feel supported, young players are able to thrive and competition abounds is the essential core of the sport’s prospect of building a successful future. That is where Mountford came in and where, without warning, he has gone out.
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