TOTALLY Tennis and Brighton Hill Community College have joined forces again to further boost school tennis in the area.

Secondary schools from across the borough have been invited to take part in the new Basingstoke Secondary Schools Winter League, which will give hundreds of teenaged players the opportunity to continue playing league tennis beyond the successful summer league.

The league is run as four tournaments, each for under-13 and under-16 boys and girls. Pairs who enter more than one event automatically qualifying for the league table, which will run until March.

The first round-robin event was held last Wednesday at Totally Tennis with a whopping 18 pairs taking part, evenly split between the under-13 and under-16 boys categories. In just three hours, the 36 players managed to get through 34 matches!

In the under-16s, Matthew Church and Peter Burjan (Bishop Challoner) won all the matches in their box with Gareth Slade and his partner Tom Skinner (Brighton Hill) finishing runners-up.

Jake Brice and Sam Randall (Costello) won their group with Gareth Anderson and Alex Cox of Brighton Hill finishing runners-up. Church and Burjan then took on Brice and Randall - and didn't drop a single game.

Cranbourne's Ben Jubin and Ben Clarke won their box. They had to play Brighton Hill pair Thomas Mahoney and Simon Jones, who had also notched up a clean sweep in their box, before winning the deciding final 4-0.

Totally Tennis head coach Shane Deacon, who organised the matches, said: "Out of the 36 players, six of them probably represented a club and so, by working in partnership with Brighton Hill Community College, we have already introduced 30 players to year-round tennis."