Second Serve Tennis

Cary Tennis Classic with Co-Tournament Director and USTA Southern President Ted Reese

• Second Serve with Carolyn Roach & Erin Conigliaro • Episode 273

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Come check out the Cary Tennis Classic on June 29-July 6, 2025! Tickets go on sale June 1st!

We were thrilled to talk with the Co-Tournament Director Ted Reese. Ted is the current President of the Southern Board of Directors, past President of the NC Tennis Association and the NC Tennis Foundation, and the Past Chair of Wells Fargo Advisory Board in NC. He was the President of the Triangle Tennis Services and Club Management Group, a USPTA Elite Certified Tennis Professional, and a USTA High Performance Coach.

He has two sons Will (24) & Walt (21), who were both active National Jr. tennis players as well as playing basketball, baseball, and golf.

The annual WWTA Charity Tennis Classic will be held on July 3rd. Funds from the event are donated to Transitions LifeCare (formerly Hospice of Wake County) and used for WWTA scholarships. Cost is $150 per team and includes round robin tennis, goody bag, snacks, lunch and a ticket to Cary Tennis Classic  for you and for your partner on the day of the Charity Classic and also one day Monday to Wednesday (your choice!)  Click here to register. Only team registrations can be accepted, and there is no rain date and no refunds.

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Carolyn:

Hi, this is Carolyn and I'm here with Erin, and we are thrilled to have Ted Reese here with us. Ted is the co-tournament director of the Cary Tennis Classic Men's and Women's Pro Challenger Tournament. He is the current president of USTA Southern and the past president of USTA North Carolina and the North Carolina Tennis Foundation, and he has done all these other things for tennis, but there are too many to mention right now. So, ted, thank you for coming on the podcast.

Ted:

Well, thank y'all for having me. It's such a pleasure to get to chat with y'all.

Carolyn:

Can you start off by telling us a little bit about your tennis background?

Ted:

Well, I have to go back a little before that because there wasn't much tennis background. Like most people that have played pro or taught pro tennis, I started out playing baseball, basketball and football in a small town and tennis just wasn't accessible for me. So if you weren't a member of the one country club, there weren't really tennis courts. So I played those sports and was lucky to go to NC State to major in engineering and play baseball, because I really needed a lot of assistance to get to college. And it was only after I graduated and moved to Cary that I kind of started playing tennis. I had a fraternity brother that was a dear friend that played tennis at a pretty high level, had played one year in college and a girl that I was dating played in college and they would drag me out to the court. So that kind of got me playing. I met some people at the neighborhood courts where I lived and, like everybody's story, why'd you start? It's because somebody asked you to, and so I just started playing some with these guys. A few months later I played in the B level of the tournament, which was the lowest level, played. A guy that was about 40 years older than I was in two knee braces and an arm brace in the finals and turned out he ended up being a lifelong friend. About a year later I kept playing and was playing in some pro events. So I went from just jumping in and getting started to being really lucky and I kind of call it Mickey Mouse pro stuff, playing with other teaching pros. So that's kind of how I got into tennis.

Ted:

I got really involved with teaching a little bit and left engineering and ended up doing some consulting and then started a company building clubs and have designed many facilities, coach kids at the top 10 level throughout the nation and just had a great time working with top 10 kids and running clubs and getting involved a lot as a volunteer. So just a different background. Certainly for anybody that's gotten to teach top kids the first question is not usually did you start playing tennis after you were 22? So kind of a different background.

Erin:

Yeah, crazy story. My background is never touch a racket. Pick it up at 40, become a two, five. I think I was the greatest thing since they spread and now I'm a four, oh, and that's next year, you never know.

Ted:

That's it. Nope, I'm a 4-0. And that's as far as it's going.

Erin:

Well you could be a Wimbledon next year. You never know. That's it. Nope, I'm on the downslide. You've seen me play. I've peaked already.

Carolyn:

Yeah, Ted has seen us play. How do we compare to the top 10 kids in the nation?

Ted:

Well I'd say that your passion probably exceeds there. So you know, probably the most fun thing in the world to do for me is have somebody that loves to play tennis a basket of balls and get out on the court with no distractions and just see if you can help them love the game even more. That's so much fun. So that day that we were all on the court together that was so much fun. I do remember Carolyn looking at me like what are you telling us, lynn, I just go play. And Aaron's like no, no, tell me again, tell me again please.

Erin:

I know I'm such a rule follower. I'm like I'm not standing in the right spot. Where is it Mark it? Can you mark it on the court for me? I actually think about you all the time now when I'm standing in the correct spot correct-ish, I don't do it right all the time, but yeah, because I really had no clue where to be, and Ted knew that from looking at us. Right, right, but, carolyn, did you see her crash the net too? Was she crashing the net at that point?

Carolyn:

Yes very quickly. She moves very quickly a lot of places, no direction. I have no idea where I'm going, I'm just moving, I'm going.

Ted:

No, moving is good. Moving is better than not moving. That's definitely the key.

Erin:

Okay, that's good At 4.0, I know you're well beyond that, but at 4.0, that just works to just kind of look crazy on the other side of the net, Because typically you'll just get an unforced error from your opponents if you do that, that's right. Okay, so I'm shocked at your background because most people do not come into tennis that way. So you started playing and then got really good. It sounds like playing pros and then teaching as well. So how do you go from all that and running tennis clubs, getting into designing and running tennis clubs into what we want to really talk about and focus on today is running a pro tournament with people that actually know how to play tennis and get paid for it?

Ted:

Yes, Well know how to play a lot better than I do as well, but I'd say one it shows I'm not really bright. I probably should have stayed in engineering and had a nice, calm life and a really good, stable job.

Carolyn:

But I didn't do that.

Ted:

But no, you know, it's just serendipitous really, having been involved in tennis then for a while, building clubs, through a long process of managing programs for the town of Cary through one of the companies I owned, mary Henderson was the parks and rec director and she talked to me a lot about how they had had high school kids and then all of a sudden these little clinics we were running that had like four or five people, were having 20, 30, 50 hundreds and there were only a few facilities in Cary that had courts and the biggest one had four courts and I was like we really need a big facility because these clinics we can't even get them all on the court. And she's like, well, what's a big facility? And I'm like could we get like six courts at one place? That'd be great. And that turned into a vision that she and I shared and talked through about building a big facility in Cary. And they hired me to design and help create the vision for that facility, which turned into Cary Tennis Park.

Ted:

That was in a 32-court facility that's now even grown beyond that. So as I did that, it was a dream of what could we do at this facility. We want to bring kids in, we want to bring adults in, we want to have high-level play, low-level play, league play, casual play. But a couple of the things we really wanted to do, having traveled and coached all around the world, is have some bigger events, and so I was able, through a friend of mine, jim Russell, to bring the ACC tournament here, and it's been here pretty much ever since, which is just so much fun, especially with the three universities we have that are, all you know, really top 15, 20 schools perennial in the men's and women's.

Carolyn:

And for people that are, all you know, really top 15, 20 schools perennial in the men's and women's, and for people that are outside this area, that's NC State Duke and UNC.

Ted:

Yeah yeah, three wonderful programs men's and women's. Carolina won a national championship not too long ago and really all are perennial just top 20 teams. So the ACC tournaments really as strong as the NCAA tournament, which is just so neat for the casual tennis player to walk up and watch tennis right there in their backyard. So the other vision we had was would it be able to hold maybe an international event or a national event, maybe a pro event? And then when Sean Ferreira was hired as the director at the facility, he had also coached a lot of kids and I knew Sean from way back and we kind of shared that vision and started working through.

Ted:

So, with some of the volunteering I do for the USTA, we really worked with the head of the USTA year after year to try to get our name on the list and finally he had a cocktail party one night down in Florida. Gordon Smith came up, who was the CEO, and said hey, have you got a few minutes? I think we've got something you might want to look at. And so they had two or three dates that they were looking at expanding, and so that led to the first tournament that we had back in 2015. It's grown since then and just the community has embraced it so much.

Ted:

Y'all both been out there. It's really cool to have the top players in the world that are coming through Cary on their way up or even on their way down and get to see them up close, because you really can get right up within 10 or 15 feet of the court, get a feel for how athletic they are, how hard they hit the ball and also just the movement and the exertion and the points. It's such a physically active game. It's just amazing.

Erin:

Yeah, that's why when league players think that they can take a point off anyone at that level or a Djokovic, they are kidding themselves. When you see it up close, that's exactly right.

Carolyn:

I remember I was a 3-0 and I thought I was pretty good because I was winning a lot of my games. And then I watched the players and it just blew my mind how good they were.

Ted:

Yeah, it's crazy when you get on court with them too. I remember you know John Ezra grew up in North Carolina, so I've known John. I always tell people since he was like my height or less.

Erin:

Right.

Ted:

And one of the kids that I coached that was top 10, he and John played some doubles together but being in Greensboro, you know John growing up there, I would see him a fair amount of time. But anyway, he came a big deal and we were reconnecting and my two boys were with me who played tennis and they were like probably six and eight, and so John did this thing where he had people getting out on the court to see if they could return his serve, and never it's just he's hitting them like half speed and the ball is bouncing over their head, it's going past them and you just really don't get a sense for how fast the ball moves unless you're out on the court or very close to the court. And another funny story is we were at the first Atlanta Open and my boys were really, really little. We were sitting on the front row and John Isner, as he is right to do, sometimes gets tired and will give a game or two away.

Ted:

And Kevin Anderson, who was a A huge, huge server, hit 132 mile an hour serve. John put his racket out and then just moved it out of the way and it bounced up into the stands and hit my eight-year-old son right in the chest and all the friends around me from the USTA were like freaking out, like oh my God is he dead? And he's like it didn't hurt, that's no big deal. And so I was just like we're all on TV. I'm getting texts about seeing us on TV and I'm like this is great. His mom just saw him get hit by 132 mile an hour serve on TV. She's going to be down here putting him in the hospital soon.

Ted:

We'll never, get to leave home again. So it's amazing when you get to see it up close and realize just how talented they are. But also just the pace of the ball even in my years of playing is just increased because of the equipment and the athleticism.

Erin:

Yes, yeah, Can you explain to Carolyn? And I barely know the answer, but can you explain what the different levels of challengers, what that whole thing looks like?

Ted:

Well, you know, you start with the Grand Slams, which are obviously the four majors, the big tournaments, and then you have the ATP top level that lead to those, the 250s, like a Winston-Salem, the 500s, the 1000s, like an Indian Wells, and then the majors, and so those are kind of your major leagues and the number associated with it is how many points the winner of the tournament gets. So if somebody wins Winston-Salem, which is an ATP 250, you get 250 ranking points and that's what determines how you get in tournaments is your ranking and your ranking points. Our event, which is going to put us kind of at the AAA, if you compare it to baseball, we're not the major leagues but we're right there. So we've got players that are playing back and forth in the Grand Slams and Indian Wells, that are also playing in our events, that might be ranked 75 to 100 in the world. So they're playing kind of at both levels, straddling that, trying to get up on the main tour and stay there.

Ted:

So we've had players in the past like Jack Sock, who was top 10 in the world. We've had Ben Shelton, who's a top player right now Sebi Korda and his dad were here when Sebi was just getting started Francis Tiafoe, who is just such a great, great personality. So we've had just a lot of really top players, but we usually see them on the way up. You know, I always tell the players that I get to know we would love to have you back next year, but we hope you're at such a high level that we're not going to get to see you here. We'll get to watch you on TV.

Ted:

So it's kind of cool to be a part of kind of that rise that they make to get up onto the main tour and really be able to make a living playing tennis. And it'll be men's and women's, so that's really cool. We start off usually with the qualifying for the singles and usually the second or third day start doubles. So you know, the doubles is just some of the most exciting. Most of us play more doubles than we play singles anyway. So to get to go out there and see what these ladies and gentlemen are doing on the court together they make the court look so small and when.

Ted:

I play, it feels like it is so big I can't cover anything. So just having that experience of getting out, to getting out there and watching and then you mentioned the college players that's been a linchpin of why we wanted to have this tournament. We work on showcasing the top amateur players at State, duke and Carolina and we're able to, working with the USTA, provide some wild cards to their top players. So we've had some of their top players, like a Will Blumberg who played at Carolina, the only 10-time All-American ever in the NCAAs that played for Chapel Hill. He's played in our event several times and actually won a round, and now he's playing doubles on the pro tour. So it's neat to get to. You know, give those kids a step up. Help maybe help them get their first professional ranking point, because that is such a big deal. They can't get into other tournaments without one ranking point. So just going from zero to one is massive, and so we're able to do that and we worked really closely with all the college programs because that's a great stepping stone.

Ted:

When I first started coaching collegiate tennis was not as strong as it is now. Now if you get an opportunity to go watch state duke and carolina, you're seeing future pros. You know tennis is so international and there's so many internationals coming into the us to play collegiate tennis. So you're going to see a lot of Americans in Cary. But you're going to see people from all over the world and they're coming here to get ready to go to Fleshing Meadow and play at the US Open. So you know we're part of their preparation to try to go up there and see if they can compete for a lot of money and a lot of ranking points.

Carolyn:

Yeah that's nice.

Erin:

So anything we missed about the Cary Tennis Classic that we want our audience to know.

Ted:

Well, you know, one of the other reasons that it was so important for us to have this tournament is community involvement and impact. When we first got the tournament, sean and Mary had asked if I would be involved in running it and I was like no way, I've got five clubs to run, I've got two boys, they're playing national level tennis, au basketball, they're doing all these different things. And I can't imagine. And they were like, well, you know, how about help a little? And I was like no, no, no. And they said how about? Sean came to me and said how about, if we do it together? And if we do it together, we'll run any community events that you want to run? And that's kind of like the heart tug for me. So right now we do probably a dozen or more community events. Just a few of them are like we work with Abilities Tennis Association, which y'all know, which really bring kids with intellectual disabilities into tennis. Lou Welch does just an amazing job running this throughout the state. So we have a clinic and dinner free tickets, and then we do a stadium exhibition for two of their athletes. We do the same thing with Wheel Serve and Wheelchair Tennis Athletes. I've gotten involved with Wheel Serve. Kelly and Helen that run Wheel Serve are amazing. I was going down twice a month to Pinehurst driving down there to help them get a wheelchair program started. Oh, it's just amazing to work with those athletes. We do a stadium exhibition and a clinic for them out there. We do a Kids Day for underserved kids and kids in the NJTLs. That's a program Arthur Ashe started for kids that are in underserved communities to expose them not only to tennis but education. So that's really cool. And one of the things I'm really excited about we started this year with Raleigh Tennis Association is working with those NJTLs to do ball kid training. So that group is working three times to do trainings and we're going to have some of these kids that have barely started being ball kids. So that exposure. We've heard stories of Roger Federer talking about remembering being a little kid in Basel, switzerland, and being a ball kid and how that helped him dream of what he wanted to do. So we're hoping we can help kids dream like that as well.

Ted:

We're involved with the business community. The Cary Chamber does a big after hours out there. We're able to bring the community in from that standpoint. And then Western Wake Tennis Association and Raleigh Tennis Association are just great, great supporters of tennis. Western Wake is located in Cary and they do a big charity event and so we host that now at our tournament, instead of it being separate to try to elevate it, provide free tickets for those participants because it raises money for the community. That event's raised over a quarter of a million dollars for hospice in our community and about 60 or $70,000 for college scholarships. So these are ways that the community can get impacted by this professional event. It's not just about professional tennis and watching great players, but it's a chance to really impact the community, to give back and try to grow tennis, because tennis has been a lot to me and it means so much. It's one of the only sports that you can play for a lifetime. There's a national championship in the 90 and over.

Ted:

I hope I can just like walk to the court when I'm 90. And you know I've been involved in tennis for quite a while now. I've been a volunteer for over 35 years with USTA. That's one of my big passions is to try to volunteer and give back.

Ted:

But I wrote an article for several years for the newspaper and I always talked about tennis is the best first sport and I really believe that, having played all the other sports at a pretty high level, that it prepares you for everything because you're moving in different directions. It's just so good for you. You're working on your hand but you're moving, the ball's moving and you have no control over the ball once you serve it. So it's great. You're by yourself, you're learning to be resilient, be independent. But tennis is also the best last sport because you can play it socially. You can play it as long as you want, and so you know, 70% of tennis is played on the public parks.

Ted:

Cary Tennis Park is a public facility. It just happens to be one of the best and award-winning in the nation, but it's a public park. Anybody can go out there and get a court in place. So you know, it's just all these things that really combine to make having pro tennis be something that impacts it, and you know we'd love to see everybody at least have the opportunity to play. I didn't have that as a kid. I want every kid to have the opportunity to play, if they won't, and all sports are great Anything that gets you active and moving. So we're just really fortunate to have a facility like this, a community like this and people like y'all that are supporting tennis, that help get it to the masses and give everybody an opportunity to experience it.

Carolyn:

Yeah, I love that.

Ted:

It's just really cool. I mean, it's a community event, but anybody can be there. It's so small. We try to make it very social. You know you can come out with your friends and, whether you're a hardcore tennis player or not, it's almost like a cocktail party and there's tennis going on behind you. So it's a great time to come out with your teams, with your friends, and socialize. Cannot wait.

Carolyn:

I cannot wait either. And Erin, are we going to play in the over 90s?

Erin:

together.

Carolyn:

Yes, I think this is the only chance we have to win a national championship.

Erin:

Only if Ted coaches us to the 90s.

Ted:

I know I'm thinking that my chance for a gold ball is going to be if I can still walk at like 90. But the only thing is I've seen some of these people play. I'm not sure I could beat them today. That's the problem. I'm not sure I'm going to get better.

Erin:

I may be still getting worse. I know I feel the same way. I feel you.

Carolyn:

Thanks to Ted for coming on the podcast. The Cary Tennis Classic will be June 29th through July 6th and if you go, please look for Aaron and me. Also, if you're a recreational player in North Carolina, western Wake Tennis Association's Charity Classic will be July 3rd and it includes a ticket to the Cary Tennis Classic. We've provided more information about the Cary Tennis Classic and the Charity Classic in our show notes. Thanks so much for listening and hope to see you on the court soon.