2015 has been a great year for Tennis Heritage Australia.
In January, one of the elite USA coaches, Ken De Hart caught up with us during his time in Melbourne as guest speaker at the Australian Open Coaches conference. Ken is a collector however his reputation as a great coach and his extensive connections have been of enormous value in helping to build our Facebook presence.
We organised a lunch meeting at Kooyong thanks to Cedric Mason and we had a grand time discussing what we collected individually.
In May, we conducted our Inaugural NATIONAL MEETING down and Denis and Liz Tuckers fine Launceston home which in part contains a tennis museum focusing on Championship and Davis Cup/ Fed Cup players.
Special guest at this event was TENNIS COLLECTORS USA member Aldo Romeo who Denis has met on previous occasions over at the Newport Hall of Fame and Tennis Museum induction events. Up until this point most of the rest of use had been discussing collections with Aldo over Facebook. It was great to have his company not only in Launceston but also the following week in Melbourne where we toured a few tennis destinations that Aldo was pleased to see.
The following day we undertook a tour of the Alexander factory with the relative of the original owners, Gus Green and then played some tennis in the afternoon at the local club.
It goes without saying Aldo is quite a handy player and now has the lead against the all Australian team.
A very special thanks to Liz and Denis who opened their home to us for the weekend and also apart from Aldo coming from America, we enjoyed the company of Geoff from Perth, Michael from NSW and some couples from Melbourne. Also Phil Bowden President of Tennis Tasmania attended the dinner which was most enjoyable.
It was a far more relaxing stay compared to our normal meetings which are usually 3-4 hour events.
In August we organised an impromptu TENNIS MEMORABILIA & SWAP MEET at Grace Park Tennis Club. One of our objectives as a group is to try and engage more with the pubic tennis community. Using only social media we had the support of Tennis Victoria advising club secretaries, Tennis Australia including the flyer on their social media, Facebook, Ebay and Gumtree listings plus email to all our TH website database.
It was an interesting experiment with about 50 people arriving between 12-4 pm. It was certainly a great day meeting everyone including a couple of new members who were keen to downsize their collections.
We had a large display of unusual racquets and 5 vendors selling various bits and pieces.
Based on the success we will definitely encourage the THA Sydney group to organise an event and in Melbourne we already had an expression of interest from the KNOX CITY TENNIS CLUB to conduct an event out there which is currently being planned for November.
Special guests were Australian Fed Cup player Janet Young, Tennis Australia Director and Peter Cuxson, Tennis Victoria Director. It was also great to meet other enthusiasts from ebay and some new potential collectors just excited to see what is out there. 1980′s player Cynthia Doerner was visiting family while in Melbourne from the USA. She has recently become connected with our ever expanding Facebook group and it was a delight to meet in person.
Our ambition is to work with Tennis Australia on developing a far more engaging display of tennis equipment and memorabilia through the Open event in 2016. Talks with TA to continue soon.
Thanks to all the helpers with setting up the tables and equipment and to Grace Park for the venue.
Some interesting collection additions this year include an Alexander PHOTO DECAL racquet which I had only ever dreamt might exist. The reality is that the company brought out a model in 1932 featuring James O Anderson. This model has never been seen before by the global community of photos decal collectors and being this early as well, places it with very early models featuring Ellsworth Vines and William Tilden.
Luckily despite their being some paint loss the decal of JOA is remarkable.
Another very rare racquet from the LILLYWHITE & FROWD UK (1939 era) was this TWINSHAFT model on the left next to an Hazell Green Star Streamline from the mid/late 1930′s
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