Sue Bartlett with the tennis team's seniors at May Day
GPS Director of Tennis and Varsity Tennis Coach Sue Bartlett will be representing Great Britain in the ITF Senior World Team Championships in Helsinki, Finland, June 18-26. This is the seventh year since her initial selection in 2009 that she has participated in the Senior World Championships for Great Britain, her native country. She did not play in 2012.
Coach Bartlett, who has this year been nominated as captain of the British National Senior Team, remembers with still evident excitement her first year of competition in Mallorca, Spain. In 2009, the team from Great Britain were winners of the gold medal.
Although that competition stands out, Coach Bartlett says, “I really enjoy the places we are able to visit and the camaraderie more than anything.” Other cities and countries that she has visited in World Team play are, Mexico City, Christchurch, New Zealand; Antalya, Turkey; Florida, and La Baule, France. “I enjoy making many new friends from around the world, and I try to be an ambassador for both Britain and the United States, and, of course, GPS.”
A member of the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame, the Greater Chattanooga Sports Hall of Fame, and the UTC Hall of Fame, she says that the most exciting of all wins was coaching the GPS team to the 2006 State Championship, a championship that wasn’t determined until midnight.
“Other than the USTA National Mother/Daughter title that my daughter Claire and I won in 2004, I am most proud to have won four National Senior Singles Titles, two in the U.S and two in Britain, all on the four difference surfaces in tennis: clay, grass, indoors, and hard,” says Coach Bartlett. Her family of tennis players has won the Tennessee Tennis Family of the Year award twice.