05.06.2023 10:25:12 | Petra Černoková has been the director of the Prostejov tournament for a quarter of a century and the Czech Open will mark a significant anniversary this year! "Celebrating thirty years of our tournament is a great satisfaction for us. We want to take a humble approach to the tournament and do our best to make it a success," says Petra Cernoskova who is going to be in charge of the prestigious challenger for the twenty-fifth time and there are not many tournaments like it in Europe! When did she start her job?
We have to consult the Czech tennis statistics and go back to the end of the last century at which time the Grand Slam player Petra Langrova was saying goodbye at the US Open 1998. A year later she made her directorial debut at the men's tournament. However, she already gained some experience in this position at the woman’s prestigious 100th NOKIA Open at which Martina Hingisova entered the scene of the international tennis. "It's a part of my life on the go. But I have never regretted accepting the offer and becoming the director years ago."
What did Petra Černošková wish for before the 30th edition of the Prostejov tournament started? "I wished that everything would turn out the way we desired in the debates before the tournament. Eight-time Grand Slam champion Ivan Lendl will come to Prostėjov again, Tomáš Berdych will appear in the exhibition at which occasion we will definitely thank him for his outstanding achievements. What he has achieved is something incredible and the full PROSTĖJOV Arena will sure applaud him for his excellent career during which he won countless national championship titles for us. We won the extra league with him ten times. He joined us as a U14 junior player in 1998 and was a great champion during he era of Federer & Co. Most importantly, as my husband says with respect, Tomas never changed the club, which is almost unthinkable in these hectic and fast-moving times..."
However, what will definitely remain unchanged is the flawless work of the TK PLUS team in which everyone knows their role! "Preparations start many months before the tournament. The hardest part is to raise funds and find sponsors of the tournament which is the responsibility of my husband. The entire event costs around ten million which is quite a large sum of money. The core preparation and implementation team consists of eight people; however, this number becomes multiple times larger in the course of the tournament. We have to hire people for live-streaming, live-score, security, court attendants... We employ four attendants but we need twelve for the tournament. We want to make it work which is why each team is in charge of and dedicated to a single court. We have 30 ball kids, 30 umpires and 12 attendants. We need service staff and if we include receptionists, cooks and so on, it is definitely more than a hundred people involved," says Petra Cernoskova, the director of the 30th UniCredit Czech Open.
