Cape Town Social Day

It’s a long story but sit back and enjoy the reading.

We, Yvonne Fichardt, Rusty Clement and myself, had our first meeting a good few months ago, very excited to make plans for our “2021 Tennis Day” with a weekend of tennis at the newly built Hermanus Tennis Club   We spent a lot of time working on the event but in the end had to cancel when the “bomb shell” was dropped telling us that the Club Championship finals were being played on our chosen date 5th December 2021..

Several clubs were approached and finally the decision was made to have our tennis day hosted at the Welgemoed Tennis Club.  As this is my club, negotiations became a lot easier. Courts were hired, players were informed, and a light lunch menu was emailed out to all.  Yay! everything was going well, and players were looking forward to the day.

24 players were divided into 3 groups of 8 with a format of Men’s Doubles, Women’s Doubles and Mixed Doubles being the order of the day. Welgemoed had an unbelievable week of weather, sunshine, and wind. Then out came the weather forecast for the weekend with Sunday expecting rain every hour at 80%.  We could do nothing about that so decided to “bite the bullet” and go ahead with all arrangements.  Sunday morning at 4:00am I looked out the window and it was raining.  No problem, back to sleep and woke up to a sky that was trying to give us sunshine.  Yvonne and I hit the club at 07:30 and got everything sorted including trying our best to sweep away the puddles. The players started arriving and wherever they came from reported how much rain they were having – not to mention the wind.  Ronnie and Bob and Des could not believe the weather in Welgemoed as coming from Fish Hoek they drove through conditions of strong winds and much rain.

We got underway with our tournament at 09:15 with 2 men and 1 lady unable to play because of illness.  A little late to now try and fill the spots, but in came Japie Klaasen who organized two men who were up and ready to play and I had to grab my racket and fill in for the lady.  We had a surprise guest IC member - No2 Lady from Netherlands who is visiting Muriel Cherry and who was delighted to join us for the day.

All went seriously well with the players enjoying being in touch with one another, the conditions, competitive tennis, coffee, beers – not to mention the pink gin cocktails.

The prize giving took place and Yvonne was handed the score sheets to get winners up for their prizes.  She thanked all and then to everyone’s amazement tore up the score sheets advising that we were not interested only in winners, but as it was “The Happy Holidays” season everyone should get a bottle of the best to take home!!

A truly great day spent with like-minded, energetic sports folk of various ages.  So, all ended on a beautiful note and the last players left the venue at 15:00.