After closing out 2024 with Matteo Gribaldo’s triumph in the Italian Under 16 Championships, I Tennis Foundation and its grantees started 2025 with their foot on the accelerator. In fact, the team of the Intesa Sanpaolo Assicurazioni Little Tennis Champions charity project immediately took the field, tackling two top-level events, the first in Egypt (Cairo) with the ITF Under 18 J500 and the second in Casablanca, Morocco, with a J300. First two outstanding stops in the second part of the I Tennis Foundation’s international scholarship programming, which were very useful for the young LTCs to gain further experience confronting an ever-increasing level of competition.
Next date to mark on the calendar is February 28, when the 12 scholarship recipients will gather at Villa Reale Tennis Monza for a special three-day training session with Gipo Arbino (the coach who led Lorenzo Sonego to the best ranking of ATP number 21 and to victory in Davis 2023) and Italian champion Omar Camporese, world number 18 in 1992 and the author of great feats both on the circuit, such as the successes over Lendl, Edberg, Ivanisevic, Stich and Courier, and with the jersey of Italy.
On the occasion, Omar Camporese and Alfredo De Bellis, president of Coop Lombardia – the project’s Official Sponsor – will be honored as honorary members of I Tennis Foundation, joining a panel that counts, among others, tennis superstars such as Steffi Graf, Francesca Schiavone, Ivan Ljubicic, Jasmine Paolini, Lorenzo Musetti and Lorenzo Sonego.
The next competitive engagements will focus instead on March (two weeks in Antalya, Turkey, for a J100 and a J60) and April (J200 in Cap D’Ail, France, the historic J200 in Florence and the J60 in Mentone).