Tennis

In Carlow, in 1884 Polo and Cricket were already being played but a Tennis club had yet to be established. The surrounding counties of Kilkenny and Kildare had embraced this game, as had a number of other counties. In order to encourage local interest, the Carlow Sentinel quoted an extract on the attractions of tennis from the "Irish Sportsman"

"The opening of the Lawn Tennis season is looked forward to with quite as much eagerness and devotion as the Cricket season is, and with certain of its followers more so, for, unlike the older pastime, it presents so many opportunities for those who are that way inclined to indulge in those mild flirtations which bring the artists in that line nearer together. Yet many a heart has been won and lost over a game of Lawn Tennis. It is a question whether this game would have become as popular as it is were it not a pastime that the fair ladies of our land cannot only take part in it, but also hold their own at as well as the sterner sex. We may even go further and say that our fair women invade, menace, and dispute with men the palm at Lawn Tennis. There are superior beings who, from the lofty heights of Tennis proper, or those who are sole believers in racquets, affect to look down upon the ordinary Lawn Tennis as something to be tolerated rather than encouraged, and occasionally when one of these superior beings gets a thrashing from some abler opponent at Lawn Tennis he, as a matter of course, stigmatises it as a woman's game. We would like to pit the author of such an ungallant remark against some of our lady players, and he might find that the woman could also beat him at what he had so jeeringly styled "a woman's game".