KAARST, October 11, 2018
Tennis organizer Marc Raffel of M.A.R.A. Sport-Consulting and Sandra Kirschbaum, owner of the Kirschbaum strings & grips company announced to expand their partnership for the upcoming edition of the international men’s tennis event in Kaarst. The 3rd Kirschbaum International, and 14th edition overall, will be held at the Tespo Sportpark from 28 January to 3 February 2019.
2014 champion in Kaarst Nikoloz Basilashvili with tournament director Marc Raffel
The tournament will be part of the new ITF Transition Tour under the umbrella of the “World Tennis Tour”. The aims of the reforms are to provide a clearer and more effective pathway from the Junior Circuit to the Pro Circuit and to ensure that prize money at ITF Pro Circuit tournaments is better targeted to potentially enable more players to make a living from the professional game.
“The result will be that the focus will be much more on the world’s best tennis players and less on players who have been stuck in the world rankings between 300 and 800 for many years,” explains Raffel.
“That’s a good thing, because in Kaarst we will be able to experience more and more the best top talents of the World Tennis Tour in the coming years”, says Raffel. The German tournaments of the “World Tennis Tour” will continue to be supported by the German Tennis Federation (DTB) as part of the “German Masters Series”.
