Dubai: With Khalid Al Ali, football’s loss turned out to be gain for tennis. Al Ali was 23 when he cut short his career as an active footballer and decided to switch to tennis — with impressive results — but Al Nasr lost one of their finest goalkeepers.
Looking back, Al Ali can boast of his contribution to tennis — not just as a player who once rose to being ranked 16th in the Gulf but also in his capacity as one of the board members of the governing body for the sport, Tennis Emirates (TE). For over two decades now, Dubai has been playing host to the fortnight-long Dubai Tennis Championships, and yet tennis is yet to catch the fancy of Emirati youngsters. In a frank conversation with Gulf News, Al Ali, who has been a livewire when it comes to any activity promoting tennis in Fujairah, outlines the factors affecting the growth of tennis in the country.
GULF NEWS: You have been a player and now it has been more than a year that you have been on the board of Tennis Emirates. What do you need to do to popularise the sport in the UAE ?
KHALID AL ALI: One of my biggest regrets in all these years is that I did not start playing tennis earlier than I did. I started when I was 23 and that’s late for anyone. Yet, I achieved what I could, and most of this because of my love for the sport. The rest is just a bonus.
One of the biggest issues before us in my opinion is how to bring in the youngsters and retain their interest in tennis especially when there are more appealing sports such as football. But we need to do something, and do it fast.
Where do you think the answers lie?
We need to identify talented kids by going to clubs, visiting schools, conducting specialised and regular training sessions so that these identified youngsters can stay in the sport. This requires a lot of work and sustenance at the grassroots level. Our ultimate goal should be to have a player from the UAE at the international level. It does not matter even if the youngster is from any other country.
Can you see this goal as achievable?
Certainly. It is not that we do not have players in the UAE. It is just that they are from other countries. From the top of my head, I can name Karim Allaf and the two Salhab brothers, Adham and Mokhammad. Karim is originally Syrian while the brothers have a Russian father and Syrian mother. I believe that if the kids are living here, then they should have the privilege of representing the UAE. They know our culture, our traditions and they deserve to play under the UAE flag. I know our Government is not averse to genuine talent, but we need to take the first step and start getting them in.
What ails tennis in the UAE then?
What we need to do is privatise the sport and turn it into a business model, just like some of the tennis academies have done here. Secondly, we need to bring in the big names and get them to run the operations around tennis. Next we should have a common software that will be applicable to all and with access to all as well. And then we need to move on to training referees, officials, public relations, media and a dedicated website that will have everything tennis in it. At the moment I think we are only running activities instead of developing and taking our sport forward. We need to move.
How do you go about this movement?
A major part of the solution, I believe, lies in funding. We need to open our sport to the expatriates and the Emiratis. We need to find like-minded people who will contribute to the sport. We have patrons like Khalaf Al Habtoor, or like some businessmen who were involved with the IPTL.
We need to bring them all together on a common platform, and even perhaps, get them on as board members. The next step would be to pool in the resources that we receive as sanction fees from major tennis competitions like the Dubai Tennis Championships, the Mubadala Championships, the Habtoor Tennis Challenge and spend the money on developing tennis.
Secondly, we need to improve our relationship with expatriates at all levels. We need to give them this assurance that they are wanted in growing tennis together.
Finally, we need a headquarters for tennis in the UAE. It should be our own facility that will house everything: courts, rooms, conference halls, basically a meeting point for everything tennis in the UAE.
