The Tour of AELTC 2007

By Alicia Priestley

Every year the AELTC lays on a special tour around Wimbledon for all the WJTI kids and their parents to look around the grounds and take part in various fun tennis activities. A few weeks before the championship this year, we were invited to one of these tours. We arrived in good time, were placed in groups with a guide to look around Wimbledon and soon set off for the tour. It was nice to be able to walk alongside the outdoor grass practise courts and watch players from all around the world cramming in vital last minute practise before the start of the championship, two days later In past years we have spotted players like Tim Henman, Lleyton Hewitt and Roger Federer, but unfortunately this year our walk through was rather brief and rainy.

After this we were guided through to the kids’ zone. This is where every one gets to take part in fun activities! First there was the ‘serve speed’ measurer. You had to serve into a big net and a camera behind it would measure your serve and display your score on a board for you to see. This year they had a mini competition: - all the speeds were written down and whoever served the fastest would win a tennis racket. It is a good way to see how your serve improves, because it has been there every year so far. Hopefully your serve is faster each year. There was also a photo area, where you could have your photo taken and the photo team would digitally place a false background behind you. You would then get a printout with you standing on centre court with a big crowd cheering behind you or on the front page of a well known tennis magazine!! It was a very fun idea. There were lots of other activities, including playing in Wimbledon on the new Nintendo WI; playing tennis on a mini court against a coach and much more.

After a while we moved on and arrived at the museum. The museum has very recently been moved, as part of the AELTC big redevelopment of the Centre Court. If you children think, ‘oh no, not another boring museum my parents are dragging me too,’ then you should think again. There is something for everyone there. First we went into a small round room with seats. Half the room was a big curved screen. It played about a ten minute movie on everything to do with tennis. It was very interesting, as it showed things on the speed of hitting; what makes tennis shoes different from normal trainers; different rackets and which type of court is harder to play on and much more. It was a great experience and had quite a futuristic feel to it. It was however quite hard to remember everything shown because your senses were being bombarded with 180 degrees of visual information and I imagine surround sound!

Then, there was a reaction test. There was a piece of glass jutting out of the wall. On each side were buttons and one person stood on each side of the glass. When this reaction test started, a button would light up and you would have to reach out for it on the glass panel and press it as soon as you could and then another would light up and so on. People went against their friends, trying to get a better score than the other person, or better still, get their score on the leader board. It was a great hand-eye coordination game.

In the museum there was also a section about materials and fabrics. It let you feel how rough the fabric would have been if you had played tennis 100 years ago. Women would wear long skirts and long sleeved shirts and men would have usually worn suits! It must have been so hard to play tennis then, running around the court with such heavy clothes and feeling so hot. It also showed fabrics that tennis players had had specially designed for them, including a pair of trainers made of real gold, costing hundreds and maybe thousands of pounds. The museum was very fun and interesting and it is definitely worth going there.

Despite the slightly rainy weather, we went to look at Centre Court next. The first thing we noticed was the two new waterproof screens set up at the back of the seats, at either end of the court. Our guide said that the screens were all part of the new Hawkeye system. If the umpire makes a call that a player doesn’t agree with, they have three chances to have the point shown on Hawkeye. Hawkeye is a system which uses cameras to accurately create a close up of the line and the ball, to confirm if it was in or out. This computerised replay is then shown to the audience and the players on the big screens.

We then noticed that there were two areas with different seating. We were told that they were the tester seats. During the championship the people sitting on the new chairs would answer some questions about whether they liked the chair they were sitting on or not. These same tester chairs could also be seen in the museum, so people could decide which one they liked more. We then noticed that the part-roof of Centre Court had been removed. This is because they are redeveloping the roof and in a few years time they hope to have completed an electronic sliding roof.

I was struck by how different Centre Court looked from the court you see with the TV coverage of the Championship. Now it was empty, I could see how huge centre court really was.

It was a fun day out and is a real privilege to have looked round Wimbledon and Centre Court.

Written by Alicia Priestley

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