Mark Petchey calls for the LTA to disband

I've just read this. He wants it to disband on the back of Britain's 4-1 Davis Cup loss to Ukraine. Britain is at the bottom of the second division of the Davis Cup so pretty poor. The implication of his remark (as I understand it) is that the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) is not producing enough tennis players of high enough quality to compete at a high enough level. Roger Draper the CEO apparently gets more money than Tennis Scotland!

The structure is at fault so who is to blame. If it is the structure, those responsible for getting the money to the right places to achieve success must be to blame ie. the top management. Petchey calls for Tim Henman, Judy Murray and David Lloyd to be involved in a smaller structure. But only the latter has any experience of business as surely running the LTA is just that.

It is intriguing that some involvement in the sport has to be a given but does this have to be so? Of course any management team must have members that know the business - in this case tennis but understanding how an organisation works is just as important isn't it? Get the structure right, then commuication is right, then the strategy can be communicated correctly to where it's supposed to get to - the people that implement it, which presumably are the coaches who will then have the motivation to deliver it. This is absurdly simplistic but other questions follow in terms of:
- are there enough coaches?
- do they have the right training?
- are there enough facilities available within schools and publicly available through local authorities?
- is there a talent identification system and then a fast track development system?
- is central government on board? 
- is the marketing of the sport good enough to attract new incumbents ideally young kids (year round not just during Wimbledon)?
And the list goes on.

I am also quite sure that all of these questions have been addressed to one degree or another but the true test is when the whole thing is put together in some form of package (read strategy) with a given time frame and measurable objectives that you find out whether it will work or not.

One question that does come to mind is: if Draper gets more than Tennis Scotland then perhaps the whole thing is badly underfunded or the corollary: that Draper is vastly overpaid. It's got to be one of the two?

The names mentioned above by Petchey who has clearly considerabe knowledge of the sport are all high profile but wouldn't a low profile expert(s) in finance and organisation fair just as well, if not better?

Keith
Keith Irving
iStadia