“The possibility to finally compete this year is the best New year present”. 

These were my actual words on the prizing giving ceremony.

I’ve always been thinking about the tournament organization in Gran Canaria as one of the best in the tour, and definitely the best one in case of relations with players.

Firstly it’s all about the location. Tournament organizers are blessed to be located on the beautiful beach with crowded promenade and many cheap hotels and stylish restaurants with amazing view nearby.

So you never have this problem, where to eat or where to rest between the matches. Everything is very comfortable. 

Then comes the organization quality.

You know these moments when you come to the court and see holes in the sand and low net? And then you need to spend another 10 minutes to find the referee and deal the problem. That never happens here. After every match the tournament staff immediately came to the court to clean the chairs, smooth the sand and change the net height, as now women and men play with a different net height.  

Physio, weather, matches schedule, life-streaming quality, communication... You know I am very eager to find the disadvantages of the organization. But this time I can’t)) Everything is very professional.

Every player can get as much water, bananas and chocolate bars as he wants. Which is very generous comparing to tournaments where you have only 1 bottle of water for the match. 

Hospitality for TOP-4 teams:

This was the 2nd time that I got into the Hospitality of the Gran Canaria event.

So, what did we have?

 - 4 nights in the hotel. This hotel was simple but extremely closed to the site.

 - Breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

Instead of feeding us with lunch box they gave us tickets to restaurants and cafes nearby, so we could experience food in different places and order by menu, which was great. And on the last day of the tournament we had a 50 euros card for New Year dinner in a good Italian restaurant.

By the way in non-Covid era this tournament was famous for the free lunches on site for all the players and paella evening on the last day of the event.

And yes. We will talk about the Covid mesures on the event. In the next post I’m going to write about all changes I noticed.

But now I just wanna say I can not even imagine how hard it is to organize an international event in these circumstances. So this was just the best New Year present for beach tennis lovers