MANOR Park hosted the annual Bottlegreen Elder-flower Still Malvern Junior Open tennis tournament last week which attracted 236 entrants from as far as Scotland, Hampshire, Lancashire and Wales.

This is a prestigious Grade 3 event, and the bumper entry resulted in some of the 430 matches being played at Malvern Girls' College and Malvern College.

Manor Park was represented by 19 boys and eight girls, who all competed brilliantly against some of the nation's best juniors.

David Hodgetts was runner-up in the U12 boy's singles losing 4-10 in the match tie break to Evan Hoyt from Wales. Pippa Lewis beat Laura Eales (Glos) to win the U12 girls' consolation event 7-5 6-1.

Richard Tuck and Ben Marks both reached the semi-finals of the U16 boy's singles. Ben was defeated by the No 2 seed Michael Ward (5.1) 5-7 4-6.

Together, Richard and Ben were semi-finalists in the U16 boy's doubles in which they lost 9-11 in a tense, very close championship tie-break to Bleddyn Bird and Christopher Jenkins of Wales. Ben Marks lost to J Turberville (4.1) of Avon in the quarter finals of the U18 boy's singles.

Lizzie Gorton was a quarter-finalist in the U14 girls' singles; and Katherine Stokes was runner-up in the U14 consolation event which was won by Channel Bessant (8.1) from Avon. Nancy Zhang unfortunately faced the No 2 seed who went on to win the U16 girls' singles trophy.

After a highly successful week, the referee Len Morris and his officials are now preparing for the Hereford-shire and Worcestershire County Closed Junior tournament to be held at Manor park at the end of August.