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Tennis New Zealand has appointed Chris Bint as the new national coach from September.
Bint is currently the head of performance at the Lavie Tennis Academy in Auckland and will continue in that role until taking up his new position.
Bint, who is from the UK, moved to Auckland four years ago and is part of the transition away from Christophe Lambert’s time as Tennis NZ’s high performance director.
“I’m really excited to get stuck into the role,” Bint said.
“I’ve worked with a lot of the current performance players and know we definitely have the talent here in New Zealand to compete well on a world stage.”
The role of head of high performance will be looked at later this year, but Tennis NZ CEO Julie Paterson is confident Bint will play a valuable role in developing New Zealand players.
“We had some really good candidates, but the interesting thing about Chris has been his approach around building the tennis community,” Paterson said.
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Christophe Lambert left his role as Tennis NZ’s high performance director late last year.
“He’s a quality coach, but he also has a strong understanding around the need to build capacity within the community and that’s around supporting our coaches.
“He also has a strong relationship approach around working with parents, coaches and athletes.
“That’s really important for us to build those community connections, keeping everyone really tight and provide the support we can to the coaches working with the athletes, but then also being able to provide quality coaching capability as well.”
Lambert quit late last year to become Bianca Andreescu’s coach. Prior to that, Lambert was the New Zealand national coach, working under Simon Rea, who is now with Tennis Australia.
Bint will work with Tennis NZ’s performance coach Matt Alexander as the federation doubles the number of coaches on its books.
“Christophe was our high performance director. So he was head of high performance as well as being the national coach,” Paterson said.
“What we realised was the role was spread too thin and we were missing that focus on ensuring all of our systems and processes were solid.
“It was also challenging to try to be a national coach, being overseas and running the high performance team.
“So we’ve moved away from that, which is why we’ve split the role into head of high performance and national coach, so it’s specifically focussing on coaching, coach development and coach support.”
Meanwhile, Peterson says Tennis NZ is close to confirming what the upcoming summer of tennis will look like and it will again feature some World Tennis Tour ITF events, which is a chance for New Zealand players to gain valuable ranking points.
“We are working on locking them in now and the other thing we’re locking in is the [ASB Classic] wildcard playoffs,” Paterson said.
“We’re planning on having a similar calendar of events, but there are a couple of things we need to get sorted and we’ll be able to confirm that in the not too distant future.”
There was some controversy around last year’s Classic wildcard tournaments, particularly in the men’s event when the country’s top two players, Rubin Statham and Ajeet Rai both chose to skip it and play a Challenger tournament in Noumea instead.
Paterson said they’re looking to avoid that situation this year.
“The challenge at the moment is trying to find the time that isn’t going to clash with anything else,” she said.
“We don’t want to clash with Noumea and we want everyone to continue to have all the opportunities available to them, as well as the wildcard playoff, we don’t want them to have to make a decision one way or another.
“From my perspective, for the wildcard playoff, I’ve never seen so much coverage for our New Zealand players,” she added.
“All the lead in and excitement of a New Zealand player having a wildcard into the tournament was really great.”
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