RIK Smith is confident that he won’t still be tournament director at the Lexus Ilkley Trophy in 2034.

However, he is equally reluctant to let go of ‘his baby’ just yet when it is growing fast and is so healthy, and he has ambitions for it to be second only to Queen’s Club in terms of pre-Wimbledon tournaments in the United Kingdom.

For example, attendances for the Ilkley week were about 15,000, which was double what they had two years ago and a 50 per cent plus increase on 2023, and Smith hopes to eventually increase Centre Court capacity to 3,000, although that won’t happen without changing the lay-out of the courts.

Centre Court tickets were virtually sold out for the last four days, despite seating capacity being increased to pretty much double what it was two years ago, and there were no complaints about bad bounces from the players, which is a sure sign that they are happy with how the courts played.

However, Smith, who has just completed his third year at the helm of the pre-Wimbledon tournament, admitted: “This was the toughest of my three years, the most challenging week that we have ever had.

“Every year that we try to scale it up it does make it a little bit harder, but the weather at the start of the week and in the lead up with saturated grounds - we had 7mm of rain on the Tuesday and a huge amount of rain on the first Saturday - there was a point where I thought we will never get through the week.

“But we did, and in the end it was probably the best tournament that we have ever had here.

“I have to give big raps to not just the groundscrew, but the ops team. Everybody rolled their sleeves up and mucked in, and the attitude that we have here is sometimes the difference.

“Everybody works together as a team, and by doing that we managed to get through it.

“We brought the players out five times on Monday to get on court, and every time that we brought them out it kept showering, and when you have things like that it is disruptive for the players and for the tournament, and that is the point when you wonder why the hell you are doing it.

“When I heard what the forecast was for the week I thought that we would have had a lot more tennis indoors, but in the end myself and the supervisors held our nerve over the first couple of days and we only played what was absolutely necessary indoors (some women’s qualifying matches), and with the clear weather that we then had we managed to get through a huge amount of matches in the last few days.”

In terms of the quality of the grass courts, Smith said: “Players who have been here before have commented that they are the best that they have had, and the players who have never been here commented about how good the grass is and what a fantastic surface it is.

“In fairness, what we have now got here is as close to Wimbledon (standard) as we are likely to get, and for the players in terms of preparation for that tournament, Wimbledon, which is why we are here, it is what we want year in, year out.

“I didn’t see a bad bounce all week.”

As for a review on the week, Smith said: “I am quite self critical, so although the week has gone well and everybody has had an amazing time, I am always looking for where the improvements are, and there is a lot that we can still do to improve this tournament both for the players and the spectator experience.

“Maybe we can find ways that the team that works on it throughout the week, and indeed the year, do not have to work quite as hard as we do and put the number of hours in that we do.

“Maybe share that burden a little bit more, and that is something that I will be looking to do next year as we try to improve the tournament and make it bigger.”

As for possibly getting more seats on Centre Court for a third successive year (capacity there has gone up from about 750 in 2022 to 1100 in 2023 and about 1300 this year), Smith said: “We are getting to a point now where we almost have as much capacity as we can around the current court set-up of courts, but we have a long-term plan which will look to re-adjust the court lay-out which in turn will increase the capacity in terms of stands, in hospitality and the public areas, and if we get the support to do that we will again be able to lift the level of this tournament and at some stage we will only be second to Queen’s Club.

“We increased the capacity on Court One (second show court) by 50 per cent this year, and that has always been popular with people who have ground passes towards the end of the week and there are some fantastic matches to watch.

“There have been a couple of games later in the day where it has been absolutely full in those stands, so we may look to do that, but really Centre Court is where we will look to increase things.

“It will take a lot of work to do that, but over the next couple of years we hope to undertake major work which will allow us to have bigger stands.

“We have had around 1500 there this year, but with the requests that we have had we could sold it out twice over and we have to be looking at eventually getting 2500 to 3000 (seats) on Centre Court.

“The feedback from spectators about the increased food area and big screens has been absolutely fantastic. We created a really good atmosphere, and we always say that this is not just a tournament but an event.”