Today We traveled to Wimbledon to experience the magic of one of the best tennis grand slams in the world. With the help of our friendly tour guide, we got to learn about the history of Wimbledon, see the grounds and imagine what Church Road looks like every two weeks at the beginning of July.
Wimbledon has grown based on the idea of tradition. During the first part of our visit, we learned about Wimbledon’s history, how traditions have evolved and how Wimbledon is trying to grow their brand.
Wimbledon’s full name is The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club which was founded in 1868. The Wimbledon Championship started in 1877, but only consisted of Men’s singles competition. Ladies’ singles and gentlemen’s doubles were added in 1884 and ladies’ doubles and mixed doubles events started in 1913. As the popularity of tennis grew, Wimbledon started to gain more attention. Traditions evolved such as wearing an all-white outfit, spectators enjoying strawberries and cream with a glass of champagne, and sitting on the hill to watch world class tennis matches.
Our tour guide, Patrick, showed us around the grounds of Wimbledon. We started by going to the Wimbledon Learning Centre, traditionally used by the ball boys and girls during the Wimbledon tournament.
There, we learned a little bit about the history of Wimbledon, how Wimbledon operates as a business, and the global image that Wimbledon has developed. We then went and toured the Wimbledon media center. While in the media center, Patrick brought us into the Sky Sports Deutschland studio as well as the BBC sport studio. While in the Sky Sports studio we were able to look out over court 18 where the longest game of tennis was played during the Wimbledon tournament in 2010 between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut.
From there we toured around the rest of the grounds including Center Court and ended in the Wimbledon Museum looking at both the men’s and women’s singles trophies. The day left us all dreaming about becoming professional tennis players and competing at Wimbledon.
