It has been an incredible season for the athletes in purple. At BUCS, it was all Leeds Beckett athletes who made it through the Northern qualifiers to make it to the finals.
In the doubles events that took place in November in Shropshire, Vassili Psaltopoulos and Gregor Webster made it to the men’s semi-finals whilst Eleanore Lake and Giulia Turconi made it to the women’s second round.
The individual finals are set to take place at Loughborough University between 22nd and 24th March. Elena Bompieri and Vassili Psaltopoulos will both enter as seeds in the event so they will be hoping to go deep into the tournament and look to win the BUCS Individual Championships for Beckett.
This is all incredible match practice for Beckett going into Leeds Varsity 2024, especially knowing that there will be no University of Leeds athletes competing at the BUCS Championships.
Part of the reason that Leeds Beckett has an extremely high calibre of players compared is down to the facilities that are available for the Beckett athletes to take advantage of.
Speaking about what makes the Leeds Beckett Tennis team the best in Leeds and one of the best in the country is the Men’s Tennis Captain Aaron Jinks, “(We have) some of the (best) coaches, if not the best coach within University Tennis.”
The current head coach at Beckett is Steve McLoughlin. McLoughlin has previously won the prestigious LTA Coach of the Year award and has an amazing portfolio when it comes to his coaching, applying his services both domestically and internationally at junior and senior levels.
McLoughlin has proved his value during his time at Beckett, earning all the praise that comes his way. Working with many rising stars throughout the country, he has pulled many athletes over to study at Beckett to be able to train under him. Since 2007 when he first joined, he has expanded the programme from three teams to a staggering twelve, four women and eight men. Coaching five players whilst playing for Beckett helping them achieve their first WTA/ATP points.
Another one of the reasons many athletes come over to Beckett to play their tennis is the brand-new fully refurbished courts that are available to play on. There are a total of twelve courts at the centre with four being clay courts and another four being indoor acrylic.
Another one of the factors that makes athletes in the Leeds Beckett Tennis programme successful is the strong mentality the players have.
When asked about what it takes to stay unbeaten at Varsity for a third consecutive year, social media sec Sky Liu thinks it will all come down to the mentality of the players, “Tennis is 100% a mental game, if you’re not mentally on it there is no way you can win.”
Beckett are looking to go three years in a row at Varsity maintaining a 100% win record, this is a record that proves how effective the tennis programme is ensuring that all the players are trained in more ways than just technique and match practice.
Jinks added, “You can lose matches where on paper you are better than the guy, but then you know that and you go (to yourself) ‘you should be winning’. Then you’re not and suddenly you getting frustrated whereas they going in with nothing to lose.”
This is a record that is important to everyone in the team, so knowing you’re going into a game with the expectation to win could get to some people, but at Beckett nobody has been phased by this.
The Beckett players will certainly not want to lose their undefeated record any time soon. Last year at Leeds Varsity 2023, there were 24 matches played and Beckett claimed 24 victories.
After this whitewash, the Gryphons made their way to the Instagram comments to claim that there were some “dodgy line calls” made by the referees in favour of Beckett.
However, with Beckett finishing 7th in the season in BUCS whilst Leeds University finished 40th, the difference in quality was most likely the reason Beckett was able to do a clean sweep.
With the Beckett players in fine form, they will be looking forward to participating in Leeds Varsity 2024 at the end of April at the Athletics Centre on Leeds Beckett’s Headingley campus.
They are expected to win all matches, but as we have seen in past years, they are more than capable of doing so.
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