Perth man Allan Smart is well known in junior circles, having played for a number of Tayside and Fife outfits as well as managing Balbeggie, Kinnoull and Jeanfield Swifts.
As someone who has always put skill first, Allan used tennis balls as part of his training routine, encouraging players to play keepie-uppie with tennis balls in order to improve their skill level.
And, during Wimbledon, Allan was glued to the BBC TV coverage which included a tennis ball keepie-uppie challenge.
Andy Murray, a decent football player, managed 70-odd, Tim Henman managed 96 but one rising star kept the ball up 2,713 times.
“When I was at Jeanfield, keeper Mark Murray was a wizard at keepie-uppie with a tennis ball. Davie Elder and Willie Hutchison were good, too, but Mark was best of the lot,” said Allan.
“Folk used to wonder at my tennis ball routine but it definitely helped develop my players’ skills.”
Allan’s tale brought back memories of my time as a schoolboy at Morgan Academy in Dundee.
Despite football not being on the curriculum (we didn’t even use that word in the early 1960s) for the first two years, the playground was full of football games in the morning, lunchtime and at breaks.
And a tennis ball was also the favoured tool.
At least once a week, I would arrive at the school before 8am and clamber up the drainpipe at the side of the north annexe building and sometimes the bicycle shed roof. At that time, there was a tennis club at the rear of the annexe and there was always a steady supply of brand new tennis balls which had strayed there after wayward shots by club members.
Just after 8am, eager pupils started arriving not just for lessons but for the footie and, soon, it was two against two, then four against four, building up to an incredible mass of players playing football with a mere tennis ball in the confines of a basketball court which was painted on the playground concrete.
This was all repeated at the breaks and at lunchtime.
What was not copied at these times, though, was the hike up the drainpipe as there were too many eagle-eyed teachers and prefects around.
Before 8am, though, the only person you had to be wary of was the ‘jannie’!
As Allan Smart says at the beginning of this article, playing with a tennis ball ‘definitely helped develop players’ skills’.
Some great footballers came out of the Morgan concrete pitch to go on to much greater things such as Dave McNicoll (Dunfermline and Hearts), Alex Bruce (Preston North End and Newcastle United) and John Duncan (Dundee and Tottenham Hotspur).
The photo featured above shows just some of the many pupils who played on these basketball courts with a tennis ball.
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