22 March 2023 | Tennis West

The historic CBH Group Country Championships will celebrate 100 years when hundreds of country tennis players descend at Alexander Park on April 14. Longstanding supporters of country tennis for more than ten years, CBH Group will once again sponsor the Country Tennis Championships.

Over the coming weeks, Tennis West will be looking at the history of Country Week, shinning a light on past winners and influential people who shaped the event.

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Country Week in the 1970’s stayed strong with total team entries regularly reaching the 1962 record. The timings and locations of the carnival was regularly debated during this time with entries lower when the carnival was played in early January. Dates of the country week cricket carnival and the alteration of the Australian Open were included in the equation.

In 1974, the country week carnival was moved from Royal Kings Park to Bayswater which resulted in a 10 per cent drop in numbers. Two years later, a motion was forwarded to bring the carnival back to Royal Kings Park.

Katanning’s Roslyn Giles was a standout in the women’s competition, winning six titles in seven years. In the men’s, school teacher Colin Bell won four consecutive men’s singles titles from 1973 to 1976 and brought his total tally up to eight titles, a record no one has beaten.

During this period, one development strategy was to send leading metro State players to country centres. There would be plenty of value for these areas, as state players played exhibition games, conducted coaching clinics, showed films, and provided administrative assistance to local country clubs.

The scale of Country Week continued to expand with the men’s sections doubling from six in 1977 to 13 in 1984 and the women’s going from three to seven with help from an added veteran’s competition.

The Geraldton district would be the strongest area in the 1980’s. in the men’s A Grade, the district fielded five teams or 40 per cent of the competition in which Geraldton claimed the trophy for five successive years. The singles championship again became the domain of schoolteachers Colin Bell and Alan Gooch with both players winning five titles between the two in this time.

The women’s A Grade trophy was however, spread around between seven different teams in the eight-year period with only Katanning winning twice successful lead by Ros Giles. Giles would go on to win eight women’s singles titles over her time.

Next week we look at the 1985 to 1996 period.

List of singles championship winners from 1969 to 1984:

List of team winners from 1969 to 1984: