Coaches

Umran Ali Director and cofounder of Be Active started playing tennis as a junior in the late 1970s.  During his extensive coaching career he has worked at venues including The Harbour Club in Chelsea, Ferndale and from 2001 to 2007 at Telford Park where he finished as Head Coach.  He joined Southwark City Tennis Club as Head Coach in 2007.  He is a licensed Senior Coach with the LTA.  Umran was selected for a prestigious Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Award visiting the US and Spain to study community and performance tennis programmes. He leads the work with our stronger junior players.

Guillermo Zoilo is a Level 4 LTA licensed Senior Coach having learnt as a junior in Madrid.  He has a major role coaching on the junior sessions and squads at Burgess Park working six days a week.  He coaches a range of adults including the popular Tennis Tuesday sessions. 

He has competed at martial arts with a world ranking as well as coaching in his native Spain.

Junior Babalola-Davies is Level 3 LTA licensed Coach who grew up learning tennis at Burgess Park as a young teenager. Over the years he has lead junior, adult beginners and intermediate classes which has given him plenty of experience totalling 9 years in both group and individual classes with a wide spread of students that continually enjoy his challenging and well progressed lessons for all abilities. 

Junior has represented Burgess Park's U18s and Men's team in the Aegon Leagues in the past and was able to gain a tennis scholarship in the United States at division 1 and 2 collegiate level which is very competitive. He recently graduated with honors that translates into a 1st in Pre-medicine from North Carolina Central University and Shaw University based in North Carolina.

He also has a Instagram page that demonstrates a few of the drills and progression of all his students that he coaches independently on https://www.instagram.com/juniorbdavies_tennis/

Carla is originally from Spain, where she started playing this sport at the age of 5. Since the very beginning, Carla showed potential that along with hard work led her to achieve numbers such as #1 in her province and #3 in the region. Following these achievements, Carla decided to keep evolving as a player and spent summers at Bolletieri Tennis Academy and Sanchez-Casal Tennis Academy. Carla then went onto playing in the NCAA Division II league representing Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, an American university where she played top 1 doubles and top 1 and 2 singles. Carla’s college highlights include five-time All-PSAC Honoree, finishing with a total of 101 career wins.

After university, Carla has coached at Central Park Tennis Center and McCarren Tennis Center in New York City. Carla brings her passion, talent and knowledge of the sport to her coaching, making sure that players progress both technically and mentally.