 Hey everyone, Ashley here. I thought I'd do a little video, something slightly different to normal. I'm at my tennis club and I've just been filming some videos for local schools to try to get them active through lockdown and the club is empty. So I thought I'd do a little video to give you a tour of the Avenue Tennis Club, the club that I work at, because you've probably seen me doing various videos on different courts, but actually you haven't seen the whole picture of the club. So yeah, this is the Avenue Lawn Tennis Club and I'm going to take you around some of the courts. So first of all this set up here is our artificial clay courts. Now these courts are where we do most of our coaching. We've got four courts there and if you haven't seen artificial clay courts before it's basically a carpet with a sand on top of it. It plays very similar to clay, however the maintenance is much, much lower and it's one of the best surfaces for UK. In my opinion, I think it's incredible. You can play in any weather conditions, you can play if it's raining, if it's icy, it actually gets grippier, the wetter it gets. In the heat of the summer it can be pretty slided but I like that, I like playing on clay courts. But yeah, there's the surface. I'll give you a closer look at it so you can see there it's like a sand on top of carpet. So yeah, there's the first surface. We've got four of those courts now. Let's have a little wonder. Just walking down. So while we're walking down to the synthetic grass courts you can see here we have beautiful lawns ready for the summer season. We actually have 10 grass courts here in the summer. The groundsmen have been working super hard during the winter period and getting the grass up to standard. These courts are some of the best in the UK feedback we've had from various people that have played on these courts. They absolutely love them. We've had Wimbledon competitors come and train on them before Wimbledon but yeah, you can see with the sun shining, they are amazing. So right now we are in lockdown which is why the club is empty. But in a couple of months time those courts are going to be open and ready for action. So we've got 10 grass courts. We've got four artificial clay and finally we've got these three which are down at the end. Take you on here. We've got these three artificial or synthetic grass courts. So kind of like Astro, a very kind of short cut Astro. Let's have a look down lower. You can see here it's got a kind of very small amount of sound on it. You can do a little bit of sliding but again it's a great all weather court and you can play in most conditions. These get a tiny bit slippy. Slippier when they're wet but they're still playable for sure in the conditions we get in the UK. So yeah I'm very lucky to be at a club like this. Really amazing lawns. So you've got here you can't see any markings yet because the courts aren't open. Like I said in a couple of months time the groundsman will be painting the lines out on these 10 courts. We've got five here on this side and on the other side of the fence as well. We've got another five courts. So looking forward to those being open. If I turn around you can see the clubhouse. That throughout Covid has been closed unfortunately. So around a year now it's been closed for but in the clubhouse you've got a bar upstairs. You've got a function room. So this kind of area here is where we've got a function room underneath. We've got a gym. I'll take you over there now and we've got a lovely balcony that in the summer you can have a drink on in the bar and watch some of the matches that are going on. The club runs an ITF event in the summer for the ITF seniors. So there's lots of good tennis going on here on the grass in the summer and we also host county week which hosts some of the best counties in the country and the best players in those counties competing against each other for a whole week. So really top level doubles and this part of our club I'm really proud of. So this is our hitting wall. Now I'll edit in a picture of the hitting wall before. I actually painted this with a friend of mine Harry who helped to design our Avenue logo and we spent a couple of days painting. It was just a kind of horrible gray looking wall before but yeah we painted it with our Avenue tennis branding and yeah it looks much nicer. So I'm very proud of this but this was this was a couple of years back just to kind of make the club look and feel a bit more welcoming. This area here is where all the parents tend to sit and watch their kids playing while we're doing coaching on the courts behind us and the groundsmen have been planting some flowers ready for the summer and then yeah in here is where we have our gym. So it's a small gym it's got some cardio machines some small low weights and resistance machines as well and then more recently the clubs installed these wash basins outside for covid so we've got two of those which means that when people come in through the gate they can wash their hands before playing and when they leave the courts they'll also wash their hands on the way out as well. Oh one more thing I haven't shown you actually. So this it's like a shipping container you can see there. This is where Paul our stringer works from. He's actually the head stringer Wimbledon so very very experienced stringer. There's our coaching program some of the sessions that we run throughout the week and then we'll have a little look into Paul's shop so he's a stringer and he also runs a little pro shop I might go a bit dark in here. See so yeah you can see stringing set up all the strings Dominic team's racket that he used at Wimbledon. This pretty cool where is it there you can see that was actually a massive billboard in the uh in the London tube stations during Wimbledon Paul was featuring on that and yeah some of the rackets he's selling some of the other kit some more rackets I do a bit of work from the back desk it's very untidy at the moment and my slinger but yeah that is Paul's little shop that he works from and hopefully in a few weeks time when the club reopens we'll be back in action we'll be back on the tennis courts and Paul will be back in the shop but yeah I thought while I was here I'd give you a little tour of the club I hope you enjoyed it if um if you want to see more of my videos when I get back to the club I'll be able to make a lot more tutorials and get back on court and show you some tips and tricks so feel free to subscribe to the channel if you want to stay up to date with those but hope to see you soon guys take care