Niagara Slam

The annual tournament known as the Niagara Slam was hosted at the Fort Erie Tennis Club on July 15-28. A full range of events for men and women was offered in three divisions, with a record 146 players and 204 entries overall. As a border town, Fort Erie is an ideal tournament location – traditionally attracting players from the Buffalo area as well as from Niagara and beyond.

The Niagara Slam is managed and nurtured by the father-son dynamic-duo of Tan Qureshi and Munzil Qureshi. Throughout the past 10 years, they’ve worked to revive a competition culture that thrived here during the 1990s. Building on that past experience along with their technology expertise, they’ve created extensive doubles leagues throughout the indoor season and are making the Niagara Slam bigger-and-better each year.

The online mechanism is the Niagara Region Tennis Network (NRTN), part of the Global Tennis Network. It’s a central web portal, providing information and news along with event management such as registration, draws, schedules and results. The goal is to “bring players to courts” and, to date, a total of 470 players have registered on the site.

Running for two weeks, the Niagara Slam features evening matches during the week and an all-day schedule on the weekends. The middle Sunday – July 21 – was dubbed SUPER SUNDAY, as it featured the finals of the doubles events along with the first round of singles and mixed doubles.

The extraordinary contributions to tennis on the part of Tan and Munzil are well recognized and appreciated by the region’s tennis players, and a tribute garden party was held in their honour in August. Learn more about them in this profile piece written several years ago and also see this blog post regarding the value of tennis to a business career : It originally appeared in Huffington Post on July 30 2014 (Read PDF)