Promotional feature
Can elite training for sport and academic excellence co-exist in a school curriculum? This is the question that Tennis Avenue School claims to have answered with an emphatic YES!
In a professional sport such as tennis, the level of technical accomplishment required to succeed as a professional player is immense, and it takes many years of dedication and hard work to have a chance. The very best players establish themselves as top juniors between the ages of 10-14, and it is extremely rare to breakthrough thereafter.
Once at the top, the competition is so fierce and unrelenting that players are usually faced with a choice of scaling back on training to excel in academics, or to continue training and competing at the required levels while compromising on grades.
As sporting success is never guaranteed and many factors such as injury, lack of ability, other interests / distractions can get in the way, it is an enormous gamble to take the latter option. However, if they instead scale back on training, players are certain to fall so far behind their peers who opt to take the gamble that they may never bridge the gap back.
This is the stark choice faced by many children as they approach their GCSEs.
Opened in-between Covid-19 lockdowns, Tennis Avenue School is a small co-educational day school in Surrey with a maximum capacity of 40, catering only to the niche sector of elite tennis players. With a motto of “Excellence as Standard” they are confident that they have devised an innovative curriculum that neither compromises on training nor on studies.
Even though the school has only been registered since November 2020, the Tennis & Education program it is modelled on operated at the same site with the same staff for a decade previously.
Remarkably, from a very small cohort, the program produced six players ranked No.1 in Great Britain for their respective ages in tennis. At the same time, one student was accepted into Cambridge University and another into Oxford University, proving that it is indeed possible for children to pursue both sporting and academic excellence in parallel.
To organise an Open Day visit or request a Prospectus: www.tennisavenue.school/openday.html
