Earlier Team Selection

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31318, 14 March 1967, Page 18

Earlier Team Selection

Canterbury tennis squads and managers for Nunneley Casket and Wilding Shield matches will be chosen at least a month before the fixtures.

This was decided at a meeting of the Canterbury Lawn Tennis Association's management committee last evening. Representative players had to be given greater encouragement, said the chairman (Mr M. C. Healey).

The committee had heard a report of the Canterbury women's team’a week-end visit to whangarel, where it lost its Nunneley casket match, 0-12, to North Auckland.

Miss C. Andrew, who was team captain and manager.

spoke highly of the reception and hospitality accorded the team.

Mr Healey said the players had not been brought together early enough. He was not complaining of the result. “The North Island associations are putting their players bn a pedestal, and we must do the same. Our teams should be brought together a month before their fixtures, although there have been times when our coach has triad to bring them together and met difficulties with players saying they were not available.

Mr J. B. Anderson, convener Of the selector*, sold th* Nunneley Casket teem had been named a week beforehand. The chairman of the Junior management committee (Mr B. B. Browne) said it had coat 8118 to send the team away. “There should have been a great deal more preparation,” he said. Mr Anderson said that some leading players were not available for ranking matches this season.

"This makes ranking ludicrous when the leading player can spend the early part of the season hi Australia, return to play one ranking and be declared the province's No. 1 player,’’ said Mr Anderson. If the present selectors were reelected there would be no ranking matches next season, he said.

A squad should be selected “around Christmas time,’’ and thia should comprise the representative players for the season. No-one had ever Instructed the selector* to hold ranking matches, although these matches had been "run with a greater control in the last three or four years."

Mr Brown said the representative squad ahould be selected after the tournament circuit ended. "We have to avoid trials or there is no point in having selectors."

Mr Anderson’s motion that squads snd their managers for the casket and shield matches be selected at least a month before the fixtures was carried.