Last Updated on December 22, 2018
The coach of Arina Sobolenko Dmitry Tursunov in an interview with Sports.ru spoke about his charitable foundation. – Then let’s talk about specifics. Dmitry Tursunov Children’s Tennis Development Fund – what is happening to him now? – At some point, I realized that I could no longer do this, and the foundation remained, but it was renamed. Now he is engaged in a girl in St. Petersburg. I honestly did not know what was going on. Now I spend all my time on Arina, and I like it very much. But when I was still trying to figure out where to stick myself, the idea of holding children’s tournaments arose. My partners and I came up with things that seemed to us interesting and attractive. Of course, from what we did the shirts with the logo, tennis has not developed. But we approached this creatively. But not all plans were destined to come true. – Why? – Several people gathered, who rowed in different directions, and in order not to quarrel, we decided to put it all off. The global idea was not understood by all of us. Yes, we created a fund, started attracting money, spent some tournaments with this money. But what next? What are we doing them for? What is the purpose? Holding tournaments does not mean developing tennis. At that time, there was not enough series of tournaments in St. Petersburg, there was no money to hold them, so we decided to attract sponsors with the help of the fund. In general, the idea was good, but there was not enough long-term plan. The system of children’s tournaments was illogical. To get a high category, you have to invite a certain number of players from the top ten according to your age. And if they do not want to go, you pay for food, accommodation, something else. In essence, this is the same as in the Professional Tour, where players are paid for accommodation, because they are high in the ranking. There were a lot of problems with this. The players declared, and then filmed – we can not bring children with a gun to his temple. And the PTT made us claim that some players did not come to us. The same situation arose when we had to swim against the current and the question arose: why? We are trying to hold tournaments that do not even bring us money, we do not get anything, except for warm sensations inside. In this case, you need to solve a lot of problems. It is not clear what it is for. – Just that hopelessness, about which you spoke earlier. – Yes, and misunderstanding. We see that the system of tournaments is not entirely correct, does not contribute to development, there is no reason why people would like to hold tournaments. When we started, the sponsors still had the opportunity to issue a tax deduction, but then she also disappeared. The question is: why do they need it, what’s so funny about it? They spent money on a children’s tournament, we brought the right children for the money – everything seemed to be getting everything we needed. But what did the person who paid for it all get for himself? Therefore, there was a lack of understanding of the ultimate goal and the means to achieve it.
