HUDDERSFIELD Lawn Tennis and Squash Club’s Ellesse Academy were victorious in a padel tennis challenge tournament in Menorca.
A team of 17 players from the Edgerton club travelled for the two-day inter-club event at the Sa Caleta Club and after 41 doubles matches were contested the team from the UK won through 21-20.
Dave Tolman and Mark Hambleton were Huddersfield’s heroes after defeating Mick Hirst and Nick Holloway of the hosts 9-7 in a tie-break to secure victory.
The Menorcan team are planning to visit Huddersfield in the spring for the return leg.
The rapidly-emerging sport has seen the Huddersfield club invest in newly-built Padel courts at their Edgerton home, and earlier this year the club hosted a touring team from Tenerife.
Padel is already the fastest growing sport in Spain and is rapidly catching on here, as a slightly gentler alternative to squash, tennis and racketball.
British number one Elena Baltacha hailed 2011 as the best year of her career despite losing to Japanese veteran Kimiko Date-Krumm in the final of the US dollars 100,000 ITF event in Poitiers.
Baltacha lost 7-6 (7/3) 6-4 but is still likely to move back inside the world’s top 50 when the rankings are updated tomorrow.
The 28-year-old said: “My big goal for the year was to defend the ranking points I had coming off and keep my ranking up, so to have done that and got back inside the top 50 again feels like a really big achievement.
“I knew that I would have to improve this year to do that and I’ve done that. This has definitely been the best year of my career, no question, even better than 2010.”
