A 13-year-old tennis prodigy who is said to have engaged in a lesbian love affair with her female coach confided to friends that she had been raped by another former tutor, Liverpool Crown Court heard yesterday.

Three young tennis players, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, gave evidence about the allegations, said to have been made at the Lawn Tennis Association’s training academy at Loughborough.

The jury was told of the allegations at the trial of Claire Lyte, 29, who denies five charges of having sexual activity with the girl between May 2005 and June last year.

The teenager raised the subject of the alleged rape, said to have happened when a male coach dropped her off at her home, when the man arrived at the academy to make a warm-up video for Wimbledon.

One girl, aged 16, described to the jury how, at the end of 2004, the teenager swore her to secrecy before confiding in her.

She said: “We were walking back from practice together and she was upset. I kept asking her what was wrong. She told me her old coach had raped her but she told me not to tell anyone.

“On a different date, she said that she had been dropped off by her old coach and he came in and raped her. I said, ‘Does your mum know?’ She said ‘yes’ and that was why she was crying, because she had told her mum that weekend.”

The witness said that the 13-year-old also confided in the witness’s room-mate as they were walking back to the academy from the gym.

“She went on to explain exactly what she had told me,” said the witness. My room-mate said, ‘Should we tell anyone?’ and the girl replied, ‘No, it would get out of hand.’ My room-mate also asked if she had told her mum and this time the answer was ‘no’.

“When we got back to our room we thought it was a bit strange because you do not forget if you have told your mum something like that.”

Ms Lyte, a former Top 500 tennis player from Shirley, Solihull, West Midlands, told the court that nothing sexual occurred between them.

The prosecution says that the teenager’s mother caught Ms Lyte and her daughter naked in bed at the home in Merseyside that she shared with her mother and elder sister in October 2005. It is alleged that the affair continued in shared hotel bedrooms on the junior circuit.

The defence claims that the mother concocted a malicious lie, which she took to the police ten months later only when it appeared that her daughter’s hopes of a professional tennis carrer were effectively over.

A 17-year-old girl, said to be the teenager’s best friend, was the first to give evidence. She described how her friend pointed out a man making a video at the academy in 2004.

She said: “My friend went very quiet and did not want to be around him. I asked her what was wrong and she told me he had hurt her.”

The third witness, another 16-year-old girl, was asked for her version of events. “I asked her if her mum knew and she said ‘no’. She never went into any details. She just asked me not to tell any one, so I didn’t.”

One of the girls’ mothers also gave evidence. She told the jury that she had been travelling back to Loughborough in March when her daughter told her what the teenager had said.

No evidence was submitted to the court that the rape allegations were ever reported to police or that they were investigated.

The jury was told earlier in the week in evidence given by Ms Lyte that she believed that the teenager had had some problems with a previous coach, which she suggested could have been partially to blame for her charge’s apparent lack of enthusiasm on court.

Ms Lyte said that one of the senior coaches at the academy had spoken to the teenager and her mother about the coach.

Ms Lyte told the jury: “Mentally he got into her head a little bit . . . Her coach had intimidated her.”

Caroline Port, a character witness who met Ms Lyte when she was a coach at the Priory Tennis Club in Edgbaston, said: “She was the one who gave the children the love of the sport.She really brought so many children on and so many parents are grateful for what she did.”

One of Ms Lyte’s former pupils told the jury that nothing suspicious was apparent in the relationship between the coach and the 13-year-old.

The pupil, who had slept a few times at Ms Lyte’s parents’ home, said: “I did not notice anything odd or suspicious between them”.

She also said that she knew nothing of the intimate text messages sent by the teenager to Ms Lyte’s phone.

The trial continues.

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