Athletics
Advantage Community Tennis
This same social entrepreneurship model can be used for any sport or activity. Private lessons should not be a privilege.
Purpose
To give high school tennis athletes the opportunity to learn to be social entrepreneurs by sharing their skills and mentoring less privileged young people in their communities through tennis. ACT team provides free tennis lessons, coaching, and works with area stores, clubs, and programs to provide donated equipment. ACT team members act as role models, opening the door to work in a big brother/big sister capacity, all while giving many children their first opportunity to experience tennis, a sport that remains unpopular among African-American and Latinx communities, as well as lower-income white communities.
Relationship to College Applications and Career Prep
Creative, relative easy model to leverage skills and privilege of accomplished high school tennis athletes into direct and measurable impact on their communities, and especially, on nearby less privileged communities
Selective colleges seek “truly good people” who have demonstrated experience in leadership, creative solutions to difficult problems, focused interests, and a broad perspective.
Background and Needs
Although the population is growing, the growth of tennis isn’t keeping pace at best, and at worst over the previous generation, has been declining, as has its profile.
Tennis has an ethnic diversity problem, especially boys and men’s tennis.
Half of D-I tennis scholarships in the US are going to foreign players, squandering opportunities for American young people to fully finance their education.
Tennis remains a sport mostly for the rich, as equipment and lessons are expensive, and indoor courts in colder climates can be prohibitively expensive for many families
Even in public schools, which should be accessible and encourage participation, tennis, like other sports, is becoming too expensive for underprivileged kids to participate in, especially at higher levels