Wimbledon 2021: Can British tennis shake off unwanted tag of being ‘too white, male and posh’?

Daley coaches children in Newham and says he uses his individuality – wearing Nike Jordan trainers, Beats headphones and a NBA vest – to break the mould of what youngsters might think are “normal” tennis coaches.

“I think it is important for people to see that not everyone dresses the same, looks the same, acts the same on court. I’m always looking slightly different,” he says.

When he started playing tennis at school, Daley was the “only black kid or kid of colour, period”.

Although he says it was “predominantly children of colour” when he later joined Hackney City Tennis Clubs – which provides coaching and competition across one of London’s multi-cultural boroughs – racial homogeneity returned when he started playing at a higher level.

“When I left that hub and went to the clubs and tournaments, and even came into contact with coaches, it wasn’t very diverse.

“I didn’t see anyone like me playing the game. It wasn’t the nicest thing.”

Daley says he was encouraged to try other sports instead of tennis as a child: athletics because he was fast, or football because it was “easier to do”.

Today, he says he is still not completely comfortable as a black man in the sport and feels microaggressions exist.

“Tennis needs voices that are not saying ‘everything is OK’. Because everything isn’t OK,” he says.

“We need to widen the pool from which we can pick and, importantly, ensure people stay in the sport longer. Then it will become more representative from playing level to leadership roles.

“We need to see more, for lack of a better word, colour because it is very white.”

Uma Iyer, a 41-year-old Indian woman who coaches in Edinburgh, agrees.

She says her daughter Aadya is “one of two brown kids” in her Under-12s national group, despite describing the Scottish capital as having a “big Indian crowd”.