THPod 1.13: MEN! GUITARS! TRASH TALK! The fastest-growing league in Hampshire gets underway

11/02/24 • 34 min

Tom and Dave man up in this episode and get stuck into seven divisions of Winter Men's Doubles Tennis, the fastest-growing tennis format in the county.
One in five fixtures have been played already, so we have a sense for how things are going. But not everyone will have the stamina to hold onto top spots until the end of the season.
Do Absolute Men have the coolest team name in tennis? Why do they play all their pictures before Christmas? Why does Tom wait until midnight to go trick or treating? And what team has already dropped out of the running...? All this and lots of heavy guitar soundtracks.
It's a high testosterone start to the winter in Hampshire. Thankfully we'll be balancing things out next week, this one got a bit bro-tastic!

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THPod 1.12: Winning ugly, and visualising tennis data

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We took a few weeks off to get the summer done once and for all, and spiff up the website.
Check out the new inforgraphics on THPod.UK! It's just the start of how we think about visualising tennis data in ever more compelling ways. And please send us your feedback, it helps make the content better and all your ideas have been excellent so far.
Meanwhile... we take a run through how the summer ended, including a pretty ugly end to affairs in Division One, where a new champion was crowned the ugly way!
We look forward to the winter and how the podcast coverage will handle the chillier side of the game.
Oh, and Tom loses it when we talk about how his algorithm performed in retrospect... necessitating the very first appearance of the censorship beep ti keep things clean for you all, lol.

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THPod 1.14: Mixed with Gemma Hargrave from David Lloyd West End, plus youth and women in tennis

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Gemma Hargrave joins the show this week from David Lloyd West End. We take a little walk through hot topics like club-hopping before getting into the heart of what it means to captain teams at a mega-club like David Lloyd. Can you bring the small club feels to big club environments? We find out more.
Gemma shares her vision for getting young players through those tricky late teenage years, and shares her thoughts on why participation in inter-club competitions is different for men and women.

Before all that we spend a bit of time on the Mixed Doubles Winter Leagues. Now that we’re a third of the way through, we’ve got a sense for how things are heating up across the six divisions in Hampshire.
Some familiar names at the top of the higher divisions are starting to rile Tom up, while some unfamiliar league shapes at the bottom end of the event have Dave flummoxed.