Tennis for all

I have been working on my serve this Summer. When I can fit it into my schedule, I practice at Miller Park in Exton.  During one of my sessions, I noticed a young man (Nana – age 15) using a 25″ kids racket standing 2 feet away from the fence and repeatedly hitting a ball against it. He would miss about half the of the time and I thought to myself, anyone who can do that for an hour really likes tennis. The next time I saw him, I gave him a Spiderman vibration dampener for his racket and put an overgrip on it.  His mother (Esbee) asked me where she could get tennis lessons for him and stated that money was no object.  She also shared that she had been to a few tennis clubs who agreed to give him a lesson and then shortly thereafter refunded her money.  Nana is a mostly non-verbal autistic who can understand speech.  I told his mother I had no idea where she could get tennis instruction for him as there aren’t many kids like him who want to learn the game.  I am a PTR certified teaching pro and the methodology for teaching children is different than adults.  I’m hoping this post will connect me with others who have experience teaching students like Nana.

I went back to my serving practice, thought about it some more, and then walked over and offered to give him a weekly lesson.  I started the following week by giving him an adult racket and we dove right in.  We worked on forehands exclusively at first.  My end goal was eventually to rally with Nana which I thought would be close to impossible.  Nana has a wonderful family and at almost every lesson, his father (Kirby), mother, and brother (Quarby) attend.  They are universally patient, supportive, and encouraging.  Personally, it is tremendously rewarding to work with Nana, I just love it.

Here’s some of our experiences so far:

• We started with explaining a forehand swing and feeding balls to Nana a few feet away from him. Soon thereafter, he was able to hit the ball the length of the court.

• In our 3^rd lesson we were able to hit a ball back and forth for about 2-3 hits (on the same side of the net).

• We have worked on backhands, but Nana changes his grip as he swings and hasn’t been able to hit them yet.

• We introduced a range of decompressed balls which has been great.

• We then worked on volleys across the net and had a 10 shot rally (5 shots each).

• We had a 15 shot each rally the following week.

• We then had 19 shot each (38 shot rally) the following week. Nana was jumping up and down as was his family and me.

I try to high five Nana after each lesson without much success.  After my last lesson he came up to me and spoke his first words to me saying softly “thank you.” When I’m feeding Nana regular tennis balls he sprays the balls and since we’re on public courts the players adjacent to us are subjected to many errant shots. I’ve been blown away by how patient everyone has been. Nana’s family stands in between and outside of the courts to get the balls.  We all pickup after each basket.  A few players from adjacent courts have come over and commented that he’s made tremendous progress from the beginning of the lesson to the end.  Nana has improved so much that my new end goal is for Nana to actually play tennis.  We’ve progressed so much and we’re having fun. Go Nana!!  Please reach out if you have suggestions and/or can point me towards resources that may be helpful.