Located in the South of France on the French Riviera, Cassis is a hugely popular tourist destination with amazing beaches, marinas, cliffs and calanques (look it up). The first and perhaps the only thing you might imagine when you hear about Cassis is the alcoholic liqueur –  crème de cassis. But, interestingly enough, the drink takes its name from the French word for blackcurrant (cassis) and not the name of the town.

It’s always good to start a blog with a fun fact.

Anyway, I got the opportunity to travel to France this week to compete in the Cassis Open Provence – an ATP Challenger 75 tournament. I have spent the overwhelming majority of my professional tennis career competing on the ITF World Tennis Tour, but I thought I would use this travel blog as an opportunity to illustrate the differences between the ITF Tour and the next rung up on the professional tennis ladder, the ATP Challenger Tour.

First things first, the most obvious differences between tournaments on the different tours are the prize money and ranking points available. The Challenger tour consists of $50k, $75k, $100k and $125k events, with that number referring to the total amount of prize money given out to all players in that specific event. The ITF tour comprises $15k and $25k tournaments. So, effectively there is between 3-5 times more prize money on offer on the Challenger tour.

The same goes for ranking points; the winner of a $75k event gets 75 points, while the winner of a $25k event gets 25 points etc. – it is exactly the same disparity as with prize money. 

However, there are many more differences between the two tours which I will highlight as I recap my trip to the South of France.

This was the third Challenger I have played in the past year, with the others being in Mallorca, Spain and Perugia, Italy. One difference that becomes apparent before you even set foot on an airplane is that Challengers seem to be hosted in places which are much more easily accessible than ITF events. Cassis, Mallorca and Perugia are all just a direct flight away from London, compared to classic ITFs like Monastir, Sharm-el-Sheikh and Heraklion which are all a bit of a grind to get to. 

This is also beneficial for getting home after you’ve finished in a Challenger and want to get home to your own bed ASAP…

So I got on my flight from Heathrow at 6:30pm on Friday night and landed in Marseille at about 10pm local time. A couple of other Brits (well, they’re Scottish actually) were on the same flight as me, which meant we could share the official tournament transport from the airport to the hotel.

A quick aside: when I say official tournament transport, I mean a minivan with an A4 printed sheet on the dashboard that says ‘Official Transport’ on it.

Getting picked up at the airport and taken to the hotel free of charge felt like a luxury to me – usually I would have to catch a train or a bus or even walk a few kilometres to get to the hotel. The classic case of this is at a 15k event in Forbach, France where every year I email the tournament organisers to ask if they could pick me up from the train station and take me to the hotel, to which they reply, “pas problème!”. When I have arrived at the station both times I have played the event, there was no transport to be found nor any local taxis around and so I made the 3/4km trek with my bags up what feels like Mount Everest to the hotel. Just what I want to start a tournament.

The drive from Marseille to Cassis is about 30 minutes, but there was one problem that I didn’t realise. The tournament hotel wasn’t in Cassis. It was in the next town over, La Ciotat. We arrived at the hotel at maybe 11:30pm and after a quick pasta from the bar I checked into the triple room that I’ve booked for myself, and Mark and Charlie who were arriving a bit later on from Mallorca. 

It’s a shame I didn’t take a picture of it, but the ‘triple’ room we were given contained one double bed and one children’s single bed. Considering I’m 6ft4, Mark is over 6ft and Charlie is 5ft11 and ¾ (his Hinge bio says he’s 6ft2), the room situation was less than ideal. However, when Charlie and Mark arrived at just past midnight, they were too tired to really care about sharing a bed and I was too tired to care about my feet hanging off the end of my single bed. Night one was complete.

One huge difference between the two tours is that the hotel is free at Challengers, whereas you have to pay at ITFs. If you are playing singles at a Challenger you get free accommodation from Saturday night until the day after you lose, and for doubles your free nights start on Sunday. I cannot stress how much money this saves as accommodation is by far the biggest expense for anyone playing on the ITF tour every week.

The club was situated on a hillside in Cassis, about a 20 minute walk from the beach, and it’s one of the most picturesque clubs I’ve ever played at. There were 5 hard courts, all parked on different heights on the hill, as well as 3 astro courts and a “gym”.

Now, I think this is a French thing, because every time I have ever been to a tournament in France the gym usually consists of an exercise bike and a yoga mat. This event was no different apart from the fact there were actually two exercise bikes. I was a bit surprised that an event at this level had such a poor gym, also considering the gyms in Perugia and Mallorca challengers were excellent, but I was in France so what did I expect?

Last week I was playing doubles with Charlie and we had already entered the event online, however, on the online singles list I was 4 spots out of qualifying and had to sign in on-site as an alternate on Saturday evening. As it turned out, I was 1 spot out from getting in… what a disaster. There was still a chance that on Sunday someone who was already in the qualifying draw might pull out with injury or illness before their match and so I waited at the club all day, basically acting as a professional hitter, while waiting to see if anyone had pulled out. I think I warmed 4 people up that day… Alas, no one withdrew and I remained 1 spot out. Stinker. On to the doubles.

Somehow in the doubles draw, Charlie and I ended up being the number 4 seeds despite this being only my third ever Challenger, and we were drawn to play two French wildcards. Whenever you draw a wildcard it’s either a great draw or a deceptively tricky draw. In our case, it ended up being the latter…

We won the first set 6-4 after a pretty nervous start from the French boys and we were feeling confident. However, we didn’t expect them to start serving like John Isner and Ivo Karlovic in the second set and we went down 6-3. 

Now, I don’t usually like doing little match reports in these blogs and they won’t become a common theme, but I just wanted to add a bit of context to the story before you see one of the best volleys I have ever hit. At 5-3 up in the third set breaker, this is what I came up with…

I’ve watched that video about 652 times since Tuesday. Oh, and we ended up winning the match too.

What is unfortunate is the fact that I couldn’t replicate such magic in our quarter-final match which we lost 3&6 on Thursday. Still a good few ranking points in the bag and more experience of playing at this higher level. And another bonus is that I was able to make it back to my own bed on Thursday night too.

The last difference I’d like to highlight between the Challenger and ITF tours is the professionalism and calibre of the players at each level. Last week I spent a lot of time with Liam Broady who is currently on a collision course with the top 100 in the world – I warmed him up, practiced with him and watched his matches while I was there. From what I saw from the side of his match courts and from what I experienced while he was cuffing me in practice, I think he is playing at the level of a top 50 player in the world, maybe even higher. The only negative thing I have to say about his tennis is that the kit he wears for matches is an absolute shambles…

Being around Liam and the other players in Cassis has really motivated me to progress and get my ranking high enough so that these are the tournaments I am playing every week. I learnt so much from being around them as well. The most notable thing I learnt is how simply they view tennis – almost all of the time tennis is about just putting the ball inside the white lines as much as possible and that’s how most people make a career out of the sport.

Cassis motivated me so much that as I am finishing writing this blog, I’m currently sat in a hotel room in Rennes, France for a Challenger 100 tournament. You will all be pleased to hear that there is another tournament travel blog coming soon…