TWENTY-FIVE of Jamaica's most promising junior tennis players, including Brandon Burke, Adam Vaz and Christopher Lawson wrapped up an International Tennis Academy (ITA) camp at the Liguanea Club in Kingston over the weekend

The ITA is a high performance academy based in Delray Beach, Florida, where some of the world's top players unite and train annually.
Tennis Jamaica director, Lockett McGregor, who was recently placed in charge of the junior development, told the Observer that the two-day camp would have been helpful to many in the programme who are not used to the high intensity training involved.

"A lot of the kids there are first-timers training at this level and they were all rather surprised at how hard it is because most of the ITA work eight hours every day on the tennis courts, while these kids here are doing eight hours in a weekend so they find it really difficult," he said.
"While we practise within our (Jamaican) boundaries here as a country, there are players from all over the world going there so it lends itself to a higher level of play," McGregor added.

Several of the island's best younger players, including Demar Johnson, Tinesta Rowe and Alexis Panton, have participated in previous ITA camps.

"We invite them to Jamaica to work with our kids and from time-to-time we send kids to the academy to work along with the ones that are already there on a full-time basis... once you start practising at that level your game automatically will rise and they also provide technical expertise for day-to-day development in the game," McGregor said.
Jamaica's top level tennis has been on the decline in recent years. Early last month Jamaica was relegated to Group Three of the Davis Cup Americas Zone Two after a 5-0 thrashing by the Netherlands Antilles in their qualifying series at the Eric Bell Centre. Number two player Damion Johnson suffered a broken ankle during the second reverse singles of that tie.

McGregor tried to account for the fall in the standard and said things were being done to rectify the problem.
"One of the reasons is that we haven't had an All Jamaica Senior tournament for the last eight/nine years. Right now what we are concentrating on is putting on a number of top team tournaments which will give the junior players now a chance of playing with our top players to help to bring their game up," he said.

Tennis Jamaica established a schools' tennis programme, which now includes approximately 150 primary and prep, and 45 secondary schools island-wide participating in annual competitions.

The Globe Insurance tournament is scheduled for May 12-19, while Mainland International will sponsor a summer camp in July.
Meanwhile, McGregor said Johnson, who studies at Temple College in the USA where he was named the 2006 NCAA collegiate junior champion is recovering well from the injury.

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