sportsequip.co.uk will already be a familiar name to many tennis clubs and their members throughout the country.

As one of the UK’s leading suppliers of tennis nets, thousands of games will have been played across a sportsequip.co.uk branded tennis net – with our distinctive running man logo adorning hundreds of tennis courts across the UK.

Our understanding of the wants and needs of the tennis fraternity are based upon years of experience thanks to (we are almost too embarrassed to admit) experienced sales staff with almost 40 years, 35 years and 28 years of experience each.

So it’s a very rare thing indeed when a customer contacts us with an equipment request for a form of tennis that we’ve never supplied, or even heard of before… But, that’s exactly what happened just before Christmas.

We know of Lawn Tennis (of course), Real Tennis, Short Tennis, Mini Tennis, Wheelchair Tennis, Paddle Tennis, Table Tennis and all the numerous variations of these games that exist…

…but “Miniten”? That was a new one for us.

Wikipedia describes Miniten as – “A tennis-like game played exclusively by naturists. It was devised in the 1930’s, in order to provide a suitable game for naturist clubs which often lacked sufficient land to create full-sized tennis courts.”

“The rules and scoring are similar to tennis and standard tennis balls are used, but the court is much smaller and instead of rackets, players use wooden bats known as thugs, which are shaped like a box around the player’s hand.”

More details of Miniten can be viewed on Wikipedia.

Of course we were only too happy to oblige and the custom-made Miniten net and posts were quickly manufactured and dispatched to the customer.

Only one question remained: Why would nudists want tennis equipment in December or January? We had to ask.

It turns out they have a place in Spain. Well you would’ve been curious too, wouldn’t you?