To add on to that, as you might expect of an underserved community, only a very small portion of the kids could speak even broken English, let alone the type of words and phrases to explain the complicated technique in a sport like tennis. It didn’t help to hear that my “thick American accent” was nearly impossible for many of them to understand. Needless to say, it was a learning curve for me to change the way I would speak, the words I would use, and the amount of gestures and actions that were necessary for me to communicate even simple ideas. As if this wasn’t already enough, we also have only one court with very limited balls and anywhere between 30-50 students to train in a day.
Luckily the other two coaches (who are around my same age) are super helpful and make it so that everything runs as smoothly as possible. I have loved every second working with these students and coaching them tennis. I can see how the sport and the hard work teaches them such good principles and life lessons. I hope I have had an impact on them, but I know for sure that they have had an impact on me and taught me so much!
There are a lot of challenges, but I like to think we do a decent job of overcoming them and giving the students a place to really grow their character and tennis abilities. We three coaches (Coach Ramesh, Coach Anderson, and I) train with nearly 130 students at the stadium in a given week! If you add in the students who Coach Ramesh and Coach Anderson train separately at the school, then it is 468 players. We coach Monday-Friday from 3-5pm every week. The players are mostly between the ages of 8-17 and of all skill levels: beginner, intermediate, and advanced.
