A New Indoor Tennis Court For Peterborough

 Who are we?

Peterborough City Tennis Club - Our Story:

Peterborough City Tennis Club is near the centre of Peterborough and offers an important source of physical activity and social interaction across our local community, with access to tennis coaching, club sessions and social events for adults, juniors and people with health conditions or impairments alike.  Our ambition is to welcome and encourage all people to join and participate in our club regardless of ability or background.

Our Club has been a massive success in recent years, growing from 25 members in 2016 to over 600 members today. The reason for this success is the hard work that has been put in on improvements, notably:

• 3 re-surfaced and well-maintained outdoor courts, equipped with high quality floodlights.
• 2 indoor courts for hire year-round, 7am to 10pm
• A strong coaching team  provided by inspire2coach
• Encouraging diverse groups such as U3A, Bright Ideas for disabled players, wheelchair tennis, holiday camps for children etc.

To continue this progress, we must further develop our facilities. Our two indoor courts have been an amazing success, but as they are the only permanent and affordable indoor courts in the area, we are about to hit insufficient capacity to meet demand.

Our Club was Cambridgeshire Club of the Year in 2023:

Why are we crowdfunding?

Many sports clubs across the country have been negatively affected in recent years by Covid, rising energy costs and the cost of living crisis. Our club is no different.

 One of the benefits of the recovery from Covid was that we saw a huge spike in new members and demand for court time as people realized the importance of staying healthy, which as a result continues to place huge demand on our existing facilities. 

The LTA has recognized the fantastic work we have done historically and continue to do both for our members and the wider community (resulting in us winning a club of the year award) by gifting us a new indoor double skin air-dome . It is imperative that we maximise the benefits from this gift by raising the funds to build and run the facility without placing an unwelcome burden on the club thus aiding its recovery from some tough years. Installing this free-state-of-the-art dome will enable us as a club to continue to offer an affordable high-quality sports environment to all our users. This new dome is the perfect example of recycling on a major scale. The new dome will use the highest quality, ultra efficient, low cost, LED lighting thus building resilience against fluctuating energy costs.

The dome is coming from Wimbledon (AELTC) and is nearly new, having only been up for 2 years (Covid reduced its use), they have an expected lifespan of over 25 years. A new dome of this type and quality would cost £160,000. This is an opportunity not to be missed, one which will benefit the whole community!

Although the dome itself is a freebie, we have estimated that there will be close to £200,000 of other costs involved in setting it up. This will be a good investment for the Club, and will pay for itself in less than 10 years. We have some money in the bank, and various grant and loan opportunities which are being explored, but Sport England Crowdfunding is a great way to more than double any funds donated/raised by us with Lottery Fund money and Gift Aid.

With such an enthusiastic membership and lots of support from friends, family and local businesses, we're confident we can raise a target of £10,000 which, if match-funded by Sport England and bolstered by Gift Aid, could end up at over £20,000 funding towards our new indoor facility.

How you can play your part

There are four simple ways to help us reach our target, and make this project a reality.

1. Make a pledge. Don’t delay if you’re going to support us because momentum is key to our success!

2. Spread the word. Share our project on your social media pages and tell the world to get behind us! The more people we reach, the more support we will get.

3. Offer rewards. Get involved if you are a local business by donating things we can offer to our supporters. We will give you a shout out!

4. Fundraise for us. If you want to run your own fundraiser – maybe a sponsored activity or similar – use the 'contact project' button at the top of our page to let us know. Setting up your own page only takes a few minutes and you won’t need any bank details. Just a fun idea!

How we’ll spend the money raised

The money you raise or donate will go towards building the foundations, laying the court surfaces, installing the electricity supply with a back-up generator, and putting in the lights. Whatever money is raised by our Crowdfunding (more or less than target), it will all go towards this. The picture below shows what an Air Dome looks like from the outside (these are the air domes that are being given away).

Community impact

Peterborough is one of the fastest growing cities in England – the council estimated that it would see a population increase of up to 35% between 2018 and 2031. The city is often described as a deprived area and one of the least healthy areas in the UK. The city centre has poor health rates and a limited supply of affordable sports facilities. The proportion of adults in Peterborough classified as physically “inactive” due to taking less than 30 minutes of moderate physical activity per week is 35-40%.

The provision of a good quality affordable indoor tennis facility has enabled us and will continues to enable us to provide sporting opportunities to the following groups beyond our core members:

We have 245 children from 5-16 enrolled onto weekly tennis coaching sessions (61% girls, 39% boys)

We have links with the local U3A and twice a week 16 of their members use the indoor courts for short-tennis.

Having indoor facilities has allowed us to run sessions for other disadvantaged/specific groups:

Wheel chair tennis, one of our new to tennis wheelchair players has gone on to become a wheelchair tennis coach herself.

HAF camps - providing during the school holidays sporting activities and a meal for those on free-school dinners.

We work with the Child Development Centre to open up tennis opportunities to disabled children and young people - creating an inclusive environment which allows them to enjoy sport at every level. 

Affordable holiday camps for parents who have to work during the school holidays

Prime Video LTA youth girls - a girls only program funded by Amazon to get more girls playing tennis - we have run a number of these but could run more with additional court space. 

Peterborough town centre: