The Northumberland Club has launched a new five-week tennis course aimed at female players with the purpose of increasing female participation in the region.

The Ladies Xpress Tennis course is exclusively for women and is the result of extensive research carried out by the club.

According to Chris Whittle, a coach at the club, “there weren’t enough women in the area accessing the sport and the facilities” and so the aim of the new course was to “try to get everyone in the area involved”.

The aspiration of increasing female participation in sport is underlined by the fact that female Jesmond residents don’t get involved in sporting activities as much as males.

The research informed Whittle and his colleagues that current marketing aimed at women across the country tends to be ineffectual, private based, expensive and not openly available. Therefore, the Jesmond club decided to try and reach out to women, a section of the local population most dissatisfied with current marketing strategies in sport.

The feedback received helped design the Ladies Xpress course and will aim to encourage more local women to partake in sport. Whittle told JesmondLocal, “it was a good big package that was needed”, pointing to the importance of additional social elements of the game to increase interest.

Customers who have signed up for this course already can enjoy free coffee socials and free access to tennis cardio classes in addition to a free 10-day family membership.

The decision to create the Ladies Xpress event comes just a couple of months after Sport England’s national ‘This Girl Can’ advert, a marketing campaign that has the same objective of encouraging more women to participate in sporting activities.

The advert marked a decisive shift in marketing to the female market and, in doing so, created conversation and debate on related issues. Sport England abandoned the usual practice of using models for the advert, deciding instead to use ‘ordinary’ women to inspire the ‘average’ women’s sporting enthusiasm.

From a more localised perspective, Whittle believes that, in order to increase female sporting activity, local sports clubs need to take more responsibility. Whittle said, “more togetherness in local areas [is needed] and to build that would be really simple…make sure you (the sports clubs) go and do the research”.

The Northumberland Club is looking to expand the Xpress Tennis programme into other sports with ladies squash and badminton classes to be announced in the near future. Whittle added, “it would be nice to get them to do as much sport as possible”.