Limerick's Marguerite Quinn hoping to go one better at this year's Blind Tennis World Championships

MARGUERITE Quinn will compete for Ireland at the IBTA Blind Tennis World Championships next week in Lignano Sabbiadoro  and Cordenons, Italy. The World Championships take place from September 23 until September 28 where Marguerite and her eight other Irish teammates will compete against athletes from across the globe.

The Mungret native will go into next week's World Championships ranked fourth in the world after coming up just short of a podium place at last year's World Games in Birmingham.

This incredible story of reliance goes back a few years when the former Limerick principal suffered a brain aneurysm while attending a camogie match in 2016, leading to 12 months of hospital recovery.

Retiring due to medical grounds one year into her “dream job” as principal of St Nessan's National School in Mungret, Marguerite, who had to relearn how to walk and has a brain injury as a result of the aneurysm, decided that she needed a “new avenue.”

This lead her to take up blind tennis lessons in Killaloe, with local coach Wesley O’ Brien in 2022, with Quinn going from strength to strength in the sport ever since, achieving a third place finish at her first ever international blind tennis tournament that year.

Marguerite stated that playing tennis is now the only place in which she feels like she has "full control" after being the boss of over 700 students at one point in her life.

Speaking about taking up the sport and growing in confidence since then Marguerite went on to say: "I didn't even know Blind Tennis existed and I taught special education classes for over 13 years prior to my stroke, but the sport has grown hugely since then. 

"I suffered a brain injury after my aneurysm burst, so now I'm a bit slower at processing things, which has made the training difficult, as I had never played tennis prior to my stroke, so it was a totally new game to me, but coming from a sporting background previously helped a lot."

Visually impaired tennis is categorized from B1, those who are fully blind to B4, with a minor impairment.

Marguerite plays in the B2 category, playing with 10 degrees of vision. Chatting about her sight and how it impacts on how she plays tennis Marguerite stated: "I still have some sight which allows me to play almost normal tennis, almost a full court, same rules, so for me it's been a great sport because I have had to use my brain.

"I just have no peripheral vision in either eye, so down the side of my nose on either side is what I see. If I turn my head either way the problem is I'm turning my head into the part of the eye in which I can't see from so if my opponent goes down the tram lines I'm fairly snookered unless I'm there already."