Our mission is to Improve Lives Through Racket Sports

Welcome to the Queen’s Club Foundation Spring Newsletter 2025. As the official charity of The Queen's Club, we are extremely grateful for the invaluable support from The Club, its members and our wider supporters.
 
We hope you enjoy reading everything we have been up to this Spring, as well as finding out how you can support us. Highlights at the start of this year include our expanding leaders outreach programme in Hammersmith & Fulham, the development of our Inclusive Player Pathway disability programme and our inaugural International Women's Day celebration. 
 
Kate Maurici
Head of Foundation






Local LTA Youth Leaders Programme

Only 4 in 10 girls in London are active (London Sport). Continuing our focus on Women & Girls in the run up to the return of the WTA event to Queen's this year, the QCF has kicked off the year with an inspiring series of LTA Youth Leaders courses for girls from local state schools in the borough. Our Head Coach, Karin Govan and QCF Community Coach Richard Henman formed an great team, empowering the next generation of female tennis leaders. Feedback from all the schools was fantastic with every girl thoroughly enjoying the experience. We will build on the success of this programme, inviting many of those trained to our forthcoming Women in Leadership day at the Club in April, giving the girls who now have these on-court skills an opportunity to reflect on how they might be able to utilise these skills in the wider school and work context.



Inclusive Player Pathway SEND programme

Thanks to a generous donation by a member at the Club, Aditya Mittal, the QCF has been able to launch a 5 year programme called the Inclusive Player Pathway Programme (The IPP Programme), designed to support children with disabilities who play tennis from Hammersmith & Fulham and beyond. The project focuses on developing a strong, local community programme of inclusive tennis in the areas surrounding the Queen’s Club with an appropriate pathway for each player on these community sessions to continue to play the game.

Two players have been selected so far for our weekly squad wheelchair session and Leo and Emerson are provided with a weekly coached squad session at The Club led by renowned performance coach, Alison Taylor and supported by a strong team of QCF community club coaches.  The players will receive on-going mentoring and support to foster both their personal and athletic development. In addition, the project will develop wider community participation in inclusive tennis sessions and develop the local tennis workforce to make a sustainable impact. This initiative aligns with the QCF’s strategic focus on disability tennis and seeks to create lasting impact within the community.



IPP SEND festival

The QCF's annual SEND festival took place at The Club earlier this month and was attended by 42 children and their teachers from local SEND schools, (as well as one player who travelled all the way from Kent to attend the festival!).  The children were treated to an afternoon of fun tennis activity in the Junior Centre.  The QCF coaching team was led on this occasion by Matt Smith, Coaching Development and Learning Manager at the LTA, who was volunteering at the event thanks to the LTA Tennis Foundation.  The event concluded with an exhibition match between international wheelchair tennis player Thomas Dodds and disability tennis consultant, Mark Bullock.



QCF wins the "Tennis Opened Up" County LTA Tennis Award 2025 

At the recent Middlesex Tennis Awards evening, our Head of Foundation, Kate Maurici received this prestigious LTA award on behalf of the Foundation, from Marcus Buckland, sports presenter and host. The "Tennis Opened Up" Award, sponsored by Lexus, celebrates our community outreach work, bringing inclusive tennis to children and adults in the Hammersmith & Fulham Borough, improving lives through racket sports.  

We have now been nominated as a National Award Finalist and Kate will attend the National Awards, together with QCF Chair Will Morse and one of our founding trustees, Deane Pennick in April.



Queen's Club receives its "Club of the Year" award from England Squash.

The QCF was delighted that the Club received this award in recognition of the QCF weekly outreach programme which provides free squash children from local state schools in Hammersmith & Fulham.

The Club opened its doors to 221 state school children last year on its curriculum time squash programme from top class pros at the Club led by Yawar Islam.  In addition to free weekly coaching, our programme has provided inter-schools competition and inspirational opportunities for some of the children to attend the Optasia Squash Championships (thanks to our collaboration with Squash Squared) and also recently a squash exhibition match at Queen's between QCF ambassador Gina Kennedy and Jasmine Hutton.  The Club generously provides 2 scholarship places on its Junior programme for one year to children showing promise in the sport who come through the outreach classes.   We are very grateful to the Philip King Charitable Trust for continuing to support this programme and look forward to it recommencing in September after the break for the tournament.
 


Community Club Tennis Sessions

Our Community Club sessions now run at several local venues in the borough.  The  Queen's Club Foundation provides free coaching sessions to children in the local borough from age 6 upwards.  Many of the children who started with us on the mini-tennis court a few years ago have now progressed to green ball 10U sessions on the full court.  Some have had their first taste of external competition, starting to compete in LTA Graded events.  These sessions have been supported for the past 3 years by our grant from the LTA Tennis Foundation.  This grant has also supported our adult community sessions, which include sessions for refugees, adults with dementia and walking tennis sessions. For more information about upcoming free classes for those from lower-income backgrounds, or those with SEND, please visit our coaching website or contact Head Coach, Karin Govan.



IPP Coach Forum

Recently we held our first Workforce Forum at Queen's inviting coaches and volunteers to learn more about disability tennis and padel.  We will focus these quarterly forums on different areas of SEND tennis and these will be a mixture of on and off court activity with both internal and external speakers.  The aim of these sessions is to share knowledge and increase the confidence of local coaches to deliver all forms of SEND tennis to support our community programme and beyond.

At the recent forum we were delighted to welcome amongst others, the Tennis Director from The Wimbledon Club, Erwan Nicolas.  The Wimbledon Club were our first IPP Community Venue and the QCF is facilitating and funding a free 10U wheelchair tennis session in the indoor sports hall at The Club. We are enormously grateful to the Dan Maskell Tennis Trust for their financial support in purchasing wheelchairs for this and other QCF tennis sessions.




International Women's Day Celebration Event

The QCF joined forces with The Club during Women's History Month to deliver a fabulous celebration on International Women's Day.  Attendees enjoyed 2 panel discussions hosted by LTA President, Sandi Procter and LTA Independent Councillor, Jonathon Dawes.  The first included trailblazing women leaders from The QCF and The Queen's Club:  Baroness Amanda Sater, Kate Maurici, Joan Major and Sabrina Didizian.  The second included former QC Champion, Olga Morozova, Ingrid Löfdahl-Bentzer, Sabrina Stocker and Yasmin Clarke.  Guests were also invited to view a private exhibition celebrating professional women tennis players at Queen's curated by Kate Maurici and her team utilising the Club's archives.  We are hugely grateful to the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museums Team for their advice on preservation and display of the items, as well as bringing some items from their own collection to the exhibition.




QCF Para-Standing Tennis Sessions

We are so lucky to have Nicky Maxwell, President of Para-Standing Tennis as one of our ambassadors.  Our Para-Standing sessions at Hyde Park are increasingly popular and the players also enjoy the opportunity to play at Queen's on occasions.  The players were delighted to have the opportunity to play at The Club in February with comedian, presenter and para-standing tennis star Adam Hills.

QCF Ambassador, World No. 1 completely blind tennis player and QCF Ambassador Naqi Rizvi is interviewed by ITV News during a hitting session at Queen's Club. 

ITV News to came to Queen's recently to film a VI session, raising awareness of Visually Impaired (VI) Tennis and encouraging more people to try the sport.  The QCF is about to launch a new project in collaboration with Middlesex Tennis focussing on VI Tennis as well as other inclusive local sessions. View the clip here:




King's College Tennis Charity Tournament

Thank you to KCL (winners of the Middlesex Tennis University of the Year award) for raising over £500 for The Queen's Club Foundation at their annual charity tournament which took place recently at Bromley Tennis Centre.  The event was supported by Sandi Procter, LTA President and included players of all levels, including alumni for a fun day of tennis activity. 



Sponsors
We are always looking for sponsors to support our community club festivals and events.  If you would like to match-fund a QCF campaign linked to a festival, or event, or if your company would like to support an event with a major donation, please contact us to discuss at [email protected]

A huge thank you to our equipment sponsors, Wilson

A call for volunteers
We are also always looking for people to support our outreach work.  If you would like to join our database of volunteers, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. We have a variety of ways in which you can assist us, and would be delighted to discuss how you can help.
We are particularly grateful to QC member Kate Mallinckrodt, who recently gave up considerable amounts of her time to help us to research the Queen's archives in preparation for our IWD exhibition. 

Our trustees: Will Morse (Chair), Tim Cockroft, Deane Pennick, Vasu Majumdar, Malcolm Smith, Brenda Vandamme, Emma Wardle
Our executive team:  Kate Maurici (Head of Foundation), Karin Govan (Head Coach and Programmes Co-ordinator) and Danja Gutzwiller (Executive Assistant)
Our advisers: Richard Buckingham, Simon Jones, Vanessa Neill