On a slightly dreary Monday morning, 14 Year 9 students, accompanied by Miss Green and Miss Sturges, set off to attend the first day of the AEGON Tennis Championships. On arriving at the Queens Club in plenty of time, we were met by a 1/4 mile queue to get in – clearly this is a popular event!
Once we had found our seats, we all set down to watch the match of Lopez v Kendrick, while Stuart and Alex Taylor embarked on their eating marathon!
The student were set a challenge to get the most amount of players’ autographs, and so for the next few hours they were camped out at the practice courts trying to get anyone’s from Andy and Jamie Murray to the very accomodating Sebastian Grosjean.
The weather held up well, there was even about and hour of sunshine! This allowed the full day’s worth of play to take place on Centre Court, culminating in the doubles match betweeen Hewitt/ Andy Murray and Roddick/Ram. All the students returned to watch the doubles and were treated to a close-fought match, the highlight being Andy Roddick serve an ace at 144 miles per hour!
Hewitt and Murray’s close victory coincided nicely with the time we were planning to leave.
Just before we headed home, we had to find out the results from the autograph competition. Stuart Taylor not only succeed in eating the most throughout the day, he also found time to get 26 autographs, the most gained by anyone, and so received an AEGON tennis baseball cap as a prize.
We returned home at 9pm, a little tired, but having enjoyed ourselves thoroughly; many of the students having experienced live professional sport for the first time and they must be commended for being very well behaved throughout .