St Albans-based Jon Meredith has won the Aegon coach of the year at the 2014 British Tennis Awards.

Meredith was chosen from a shortlist of seven coaches that were selected earlier this year at the LTA coaches’ conference, where he was named performance coach of the year.

He has been rewarded for his contribution to tennis coaching in his role as head coach at Batchwood High Performance Centre in St Albans where he has worked since 2007.

Nearly three years ago, a fire devastated the centre, yet the HPC programme has still enjoyed more success despite the obvious challenges presented in timetabling.

Meredith said: “This award has been the culmination of nearly eight years of work with some great people.

“There have been some real highs and lows in that time, with the tennis centre having burned down and then the opening of a new centre in May.

“I want to recognise all of my colleagues during the time of the fire who were involved in rebuilding the centre.

“Liz Jones was absolutely in the thick of it with me from moving everyone around and keeping people together, and Richard Schwe at the council was integral to rebuilding the centre.

“It’s been the pinnacle of my coaching career to open the new centre, and now we’re back in the new facility, we’ll build on that and continue to produce and nurture young players.”

He coninued: ”My performance philosophy is very much from the bottom up, so we treat young players as blank canvases.

“Over time we help them advance, from Mini Tennis right through to more intensive coaching. It’s an authentic and genuine way to produce players.”

Meredith set up the Pathway to Tarbes scheme with the philosophy of producing talent from the first lesson onwards, getting the most qualified coaches working with the youngest players.

This has seen Meredith’s coaching produce more than 38 national matrix players, one junior grand slam player, four that have represented Great Britain and eight nationally trained juniors.

Over 5,000 school children are seen per year by Meredith, invited onto the Batchwood performance pathway at the age of five. It is from this pool of school children that high performance tennis players are nurtured.

Meredith has also set up between 15 and 20 Mini Tennis clubs in schools, enabling more than 300 children to regularly play tennis.