Tennis
Promoting wheelchair tennis is one of the ways through Motivations helps its beneficiaries discover and demonstrate their abilities. Because of this, the tennis program also includes organizing demonstrative events. The most important such event took place at the BCR Open Competition organized in 2003 and 2004 in Bucharest, where Motivation’s own tennis men played against world champions Guillermo Villas, Ilie Nastase and Andrei Pavel.
In 2003, Motivation became affiliated with ITF (http://www.itftennis.com/wheelchair) and began the first training sessions with wheelchair users. Two wheelchair accessible tennis courts were build in Bragadiru, close to the Motivation Center. Mark Bullock, Coordinator for Growth of the International Tennis Federation, who came to Romania to start the first tennis program for wheelchair users, and Samuel Harminc, were the Romanian wheelchair players’ first coaches.
In 2004, our players took part in their first international competition, the Szinvanet Turnament in Miskolc, Hungary, where the played against world-renowned wheelchair tennis men. When they came back to Romania, the team organized a tennis camp, with Prof. Peter Arballo, former US wheelchair tennis champion as a special guest. In order to keep developing the program in Romania, Motivation started receiving yearly grants from the ITF – Johann Cruyff Foundation in 2005 to organize wheelchair tennis camps for the youth.
In 2007, between the 16th and 19th of August, Crina Tugui, sportswoman with Motivation, participated in the women’s competition of wheelchair tennis of the “Cruyff Silver Fund Cup”. Crina won first place, and qualified for the Beijing Paralympic Games – September – October 2008.
The Vodafone Romania Foundation and Motivation Romania Foundation held the International Tennis Wheelchair Tournament for the second consecutive year in 2008.