Albany tennis young gun Tea Zizek books her place in WA stage of nationwide Rafa Nadal Tour

Albany junior tennis player Tea Zizek has booked her place in the Rafa Nadal Tour Masters in Melbourne next year after reaching the finals in the WA stage of the tour qualifiers earlier this month. Tea, 10, reached the final in the under-12 category of the competition’s qualifiers with the final round ultimately cancelled due to poor weather conditions. Both finalists subsequently qualified for the national event as a result of the final round cancellation. The Rafa Nadal Tour Masters is a junior tennis circuit launched in Spain in 2014 and has been running in Australia since 2019 with qualifying events in every State and territory. Tea will now jet off to the Eastern States for the tournament which is scheduled to be held from January 9-13. The keen tennis young gun is a product of Albany-based indoor club OnCourt Tennis. Owner and coach Vincent Brochard has trained and mentored Tea from the dawn of her tennis journey and said she continued to make strides in her game. “Tea’s hard work on the court and dedication to the training schedule I’ve created for her is to be applauded,” he said. “We will continue to work on improvements to her game over the next six months as she prepares for the trip to Melbourne for the masters event.” Bouchard said there would be fresh challenges with the tournament in January set to be played on clay courts. “We have six months to train and we will have to go to Perth, it’s a completely different style of play on the clay,” he said. “You have to slide a lot more and the game is much slower, so it will be a new challenge for her. “She doesn’t have many limits with the training and effort she puts in, sometimes with a player this age it can difficult, but she is already understanding the hard work that is required, it’s great to see.” All participants at the masters events will get further Rafa Nadal Academy related prizes, with the chance to potentially meet 22-time grand slam winner Rafael Nadal and also win flights to Spain and two weeks of training at the Rafa Nadal Academy in Mallorca later in 2024.