Where are the Marcus Rashfords of British tennis? My fear is that they are still not welcome | Chris Marshall

TEnnis, a head coach at a prestigious Surrey club, casually remarked to me, will never have a Marcus Rashford. The throwaway comment was made at a sparsely attended coaching forum on diversity in tennis in 2022. Less than six months later, I was at the Surrey Under-9 Girls County Cup with nine-year-old Sabein Weldegebriel, whose mother is from Ethiopia. I was coaching her in a park next to a council estate in south London.

Sabein’s success in reaching the provincial level should give me hope that the head coach was wrong, but having been in the sport for twenty years, it’s hard for me to disagree with him. Why? Because the cost of becoming a professional tennis player is prohibitively expensive for most kids, and the tennis establishment does very little to nurture talent the way that sports like soccer do.

There is consensus that each year of a player’s life roughly equates to the number of hours per week they need to spend on court to be on the road to competitive tennis. With a private lesson costing anywhere from £35 to £90, and group sessions averaging £14 an hour in South East England, Sabein’s mother would need to find at least £500 a month.

Sabein has had 100 hours of unpaid lessons with me in the last 12 months. We saw her talent right away when she came to us G tennis (grassroots tennis) about four years ago. A local charity that supports single parents, the Cheer Trust, paid for the initial group sessions, but G Tennis has provided the rest for free. In addition to the coaching fee and the £700 in court fees to Lambeth Council, there are the costs of tournament entry, travel and equipment.

Fortunately, G Tennis has some incredibly generous friends, family and clients who have donated money to help Sabein’s progress. She reached the quarter-finals of the Surrey County Cup last August, was in the top eight for county selection this year and has won her last three tournaments without dropping a set.

During a poorly attended talk I gave on diversity and inclusion at the Surrey Tennis County Forum, one audience member told me she had questioned a committee member at her tennis club about the lack of diversity and asked what they could do to remedy the situation . The answer she got was: The black children play football and the Asian children play cricket. I think it went well.

I really hope that attitude is a minority attitude, but I have seen racism towards South Asians who play tennis and I have a good black friend who was mistaken for a cleaner a few years ago when he was playing in a tournament at a top club in West London. I fear that there are similarities between cricket and tennis, where some people are not quite ready to embrace all of our communities and their untapped talent pool.

When I talk to people outside the sport they always say, doesn’t the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) step in and fund the players? My answer is always yes, if a player is exceptionally good and regionally highly ranked, but to get a player to that level requires thousands of hours of coaching and a second salary to pay for it. The truth is that the LTA rarely funds players from less affluent backgrounds because they simply never reach that point in their development.

Although Sabein is in the Surrey County under 10s team, to reach the senior level and qualify for LTA funding she must compete against girls who coach more than 10 hours a week. Some even fly across the country and compete in tournaments to achieve a higher rank.

Every Wimbledon we hear the same old question: Why don’t we have more players in the second week? My answer every time is: If you get more kids playing at grassroots level, more will filter through as the pathways are created. There are some great LTA initiatives for kids to try tennis initially, but the challenge remains: if we identify a talented child who doesn’t come from a wealthy family, how do we give them access to what they need to excel? At the moment there is no recognised pathway.

So what’s the solution? Clubs need to become more inclusive, so that a wider demographic of people see tennis as a sport they can not only play, but also become committee members and even work in. And coaches need to make coaching more accessible.

G Tennis has been launched Young champions, a charity that does just that. Our campaign Project 10K Backed by a number of tennis greats, including Jack Draper, the aim is to get 100 clubs and coaches to offer two hours of coaching per week at the truly affordable rate of two hours per hour or less, resulting in 10,000 subsidised hours per year.

I hope that the system can change so that children like Sabein will have the chance to step onto the hallowed turf of SW19 in the years to come. For now, thanks to a kind member of the LTA board, Sabein has a ticket to Wimbledon and will watch from the sidelines, hoping that her dream of playing there will one day come true. The romantic in me still wants to believe that a girl from a country estate, raised by a single parent, could one day make it, but the harsh reality is that the odds are stacked against her.

• Chris Marshall is a level 4 senior performance coach and co-founder of G Tennis and Young champions

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