The 40th edition of Tennis Europe’s Top Executives’ Meeting was held in Prague, Czech Republic, from 28-29 November, and saw attendance from 42 delegates, representing 34 of the European Tennis Federation’s 50 member nations.
17 high-level speakers from across the sports industry took to the stage during the event to address the assembly on issues related to three main topics:
- Digitalisation,
- Event Management
- Fundraising & Sponsorship
The Top Executives’ Meeting is devised to provide the Chief Executive Officers and General Secretaries of European national tennis federations with an opportunity to meet, share best practices, debate contemporary issues affecting the sport, and to receive education relating to international sports management.
The event was opened by Czech Tennis Association President and Tennis Europe Vice-President Ivo Kaderka’. Following updates from Tennis Europe CEO Thomas Hammerl and ITF COO Kelly Fairweather, the first afternoon featured presentations from representatives of HEAD (Christian Wilber), adidas (Mats Merkel), the European Observatoire of Sport and Employment (Ben Gittus) and the Hungarian Tennis Association (Attila Richter).
The morning of Day 2 focused on Digitalisation, with interventions from FC Bayern München, the ITF, French Tennis Federation and SAP (Achim Ittner). Following a lunch break, the meeting explored the topic of Event Management with speakers from e|motion Management (Herwig Straka), Top Five Management (Stéphane Gurov), Polish Tennis Association (Magdalena Rejniak-Romer) and Tennis Europe (Marta Conean).
Tennis Europe Chief Executive Officer Thomas Hammerl commented, “Our aim is for each and every participant to reap some personal benefit from their attendance. This year we were particularly happy to have representatives from such a broad cross section of the sports industry. Tennis has many lessons to learn from our colleagues in other sports, and it has been very satisfying to see such dialogue taking place.”
The complete programme for the 2018 Top Executives’ Meeting can be found here | Photo Gallery.