Tennis merger in Hückeswagen was a good decision

The youth department of TC Hückeswagen currently consists of around 35 children and young people between the ages of six and 14. “We want to soon work with the Marienheide tennis school to get into schools and create further offers to get even more children and young people interested in tennis,” explains Karthaus.

The merger itself, which was unanimously approved in May 2023, only caused a manageable amount of changes for the long-standing members of HTC and Blau-Rot. “As far as events are concerned, we had already worked closely together three or four years before the merger, organized the city championship together and had a stand at the Old Town Festival,” explains Karthaus. The members were already familiar with working together. The advantage of the club merger, however, is “that we can now rely on more people and of course save a lot of costs.”

The facilities of the two former clubs were transferred to TC Hückeswagen. There are no plans to sell off courts. “With our current size of 200 members, we need four to five courts anyway. With the two facilities, we currently have six.” The teams were well distributed across the facilities, the training capacities were currently good, but not fully utilized, so additional offers are possible.

The next step in the club’s plan is to offer open training for non-members every first Thursday of the month from 6 p.m. The board hopes that this will inspire some amateur athletes to take up the classic racquet sport or even reactivate former tennis players. Karthaus stresses that the board is very satisfied with the merger and the development of TC Hückeswagen so far.

What tennis has done could now set a precedent. Two football clubs in the castle town are currently considering merging. They are talking about the traditional club RSV 09 Hückeswagen (district league B), which has been a fixture in the town for 115 years, and SC Heide (district league A), which was founded almost seven years ago. Both clubs could imagine a merger, but the naming seems to be a bigger problem here, because nobody is obviously going to give up their name.

“When a new club is formed from a merger, it is always advisable to choose a new name,” says Rebecca Fey from TC Hückeswagen. The tennis players themselves choose their new names from a compiled list. “There was a brainstorming session beforehand with the board members, who suggested names from which the entire club could then choose,” she reports. During the merger process, explains Fey, the two former clubs sought advice from the state sports association. “They came by, spoke to the members, got an idea of ​​the situation and then advised us,” remembers Karthaus.

The process did not go entirely smoothly. “A merger like this is always a bit bumpy, of course. But ultimately we all had our eyes on the future. “It was simply a good decision for the club and the sport,” he says. One result of the good cooperation was this year’s city championship, which the tennis players organized for the first time as a merged club and also held for the first time as an open championship, so that tennis players from neighboring towns could also take part. “It was very well received,” says Karthaus happily. Of the 54 participants, a good ten percent were from outside the club, from Radevormwald, Remscheid and Wermelskirchen.