The TIA UK is encouraging the Lawn Tennis Association, the Tennis Foundation, Tennis Scotland, Tennis Wales, Sport England, the Department for Children Schools and Families and IFM Sports Marketing Surveys to collaborate over the sharing of information to help determine a public benchmark against which to determine whether British tennis is growing or in decline.

To start this important project, we have produced the first report against which future editions will be measured.

The Health of GB Tennis gives figures on numbers on players, frequency of play, ball and racket sales and so on to give a snapshot of our sport.

With the introduction of Sport England's Active People database, the LTA's research and the tennis industry's collaborative data, it is now possible to collate and publish relevant data to help determine the game's general health.

The aim is to track available data consistently over the next few years to see how tennis performs as a sport in these islands.

Indicators to be tracked include:

• Participation - How many people play tennis?
• Junior players
• Coaches
• Tennis Courts
• Clubs
• Schools Tennis
• Parks
• The Tennis Market

These benchmarks will be refined and added to as more information becomes available.

The first Health of GB Tennis is now available, published summer 2010, and can be downloaded from this page together with the media alert issued on 12 August 2010 announcing the project.

The TIA UK Research Project is headed up by Phil Sandilands (TrioPlus Ltd) who has been working closely with Sophie Curthoys (Lawn Tennis Association), Tony Scott (IFM Sports Marketing Surveys) and Gilly English (Executive Administrator, Tennis Industry Association UK) over the pooling of resources.

It is hoped to publish the ‘Health of GB Tennis' report on a regular basis and the first edition already reveals some interesting facts and figures:

• Nearly 1 million people play tennis one a month
• There are 23,000 tennis courts in the UK
• 79% of schools now offer tennis in England
• Around 600,000 tennis rackets were purchased in Great Britain last year
• Some 1 million dozen tennis balls were purchase in 2009