Second Serve Tennis

National Tennis Month - Ask Someone To Play!

• Second Serve with Carolyn Roach & Erin Conigliaro • Episode 272

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May is National Tennis Month! We love to play tennis but how can we encourage others to play? Tell us what we are forgetting. 

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Carolyn:

Hi, this is Carolyn and I'm here with Erin and it is May, which is National Tennis Month, and the purpose of National Tennis Month is to grow the game of tennis. I know everyone listening probably already loves tennis, but we want more people to play. So, aaron, how can we get more people, or your friends, to play?

Erin:

Well, first of all, everybody should play tennis. So there's so many different ways to get people to play. First of all, I mean, I think a lot of people that play tennis are passionate about it and they probably post on their social media so maybe their friends see it. I've done that in the past and I had a friend reach out like you know, sent me a text and was like, would you come out and hit with me one day? So that's a really easy way to get people. But these are the things that I thought about the way that I started playing, because I have said this before on our podcast I never touched a racket until I was 40.

Erin:

And the reason I started playing was because I really wanted to find something I could do as an adult that didn't involve, you know, being part of the PTA or you know. I wanted a sport that I could do in my later years. So at 40, I tried kickball with my husband and that was just a little bit silly, because at 40 years old we were kind of already aged out of kickball. Those are more like 22 to 27 year olds that are playing. So we were already like the old, you know, even though we had young kids. We were like the old, the old folks of the group, so that felt a little weird. So then I was like, okay, I can't really do volleyball because I was afraid I was going to get hurt jumping and spiking, and I had really never played before, I just loved the sport. So that's how I found tennis.

Erin:

So my husband, very sweetly, bought five lessons for me. He did his own research, found a pro you know locally and bought me five lessons for Christmas. It was the best, probably Christmas gift I've ever given. I've ever been given, excuse me. So he bought me the first five and then I was addicted to it immediately and bought myself five more lessons and five more. I probably did that like I don't know four or five times. So I just did, like you know, many lessons just to learn how to hold the racket, how to hit the ball, everything Very, very, very basics. Literally had never touched a racket before that. So that was great. So that's really how I got started and that's how so many people can get started. They can just find a local. They could probably literally Google tennis lessons near me and something will pop up, because everything is listed on the internet and anything you know. Google something and say near me and you'll get it aggregated just for your area.

Carolyn:

Yeah, that's great. That's great, and then you can also you can just ask friends to play you, as someone that plays a lot.

Erin:

Yeah, you don't have to take a lesson. Yeah, you can just hit. You can literally take a racket and some balls and walk out on a public tennis court and start playing. It's very difficult. People will be surprised that it's like when I started. I don't know about you, Carolyn. When I started I thought it was a fairly simple sport.

Erin:

It was not To this day Exactly. It is hard but fun. I mean obviously fun To this day. I'm like man. I thought it was so simple, like all I had to do is get that ball in the other side of the net, but it's. You know how fast does the ball spin? Can I get my serve in the right box? What's my strategy? Do I have good footwork? It's a million things. Nonetheless, when you start, all you have to do is be willing to walk out on a public tennis court, take a ball and a racket with you and have somebody on the well, I was gonna say and have somebody on the other side willing to hit with you. But actually that leads me to what you told me earlier. Somebody reached out to you and talked about hitting against a wall.

Carolyn:

Right yeah, At lunchtime. She goes and hits against the wall every day and it's such a stress reliever. And we were recently at the awards ceremony for the Southern section.

Erin:

We're in North Carolina, which is the Southern section, and what did they have written on a little card If you could smash something, you can play tennis. Exactly, if you can smash, you can tennis. Yes, yes, it's genius, I know, but if you don't know where to go.

Carolyn:

I didn't know this before even starting this podcast, but there's community tennis association. So wherever you live, you can Google local community tennis association and they have so much information about what where you can go to play tennis. You can also sign up for clinics. They can probably lead you in the right directions to sign up for clinics. They can probably lead you in the right directions to sign up for clinics or whatever. Public parks may have different ladders or quads.

Erin:

Yeah, I actually, when I was very new to tennis, after I took all those lessons, I did join out of our local Parks and Rec. I joined a singles tennis ladder, yes, and all that entailed wasn't everyone does it different around the country, but what? In our area? All I had to do was I signed up through my parks and rec. They gave me, and everybody that was on the tennis ladder, a list of everybody else that had signed up, and then it was. It was.

Erin:

You took it upon yourself to contact that other person and then you would just they're like challenge matches, right, yeah I would just call up whoever was next on the list that I wanted to play and say you know, can you play at this court at this time?

Erin:

You know, it's just basically, you know, just making a plan with that person show up, play a match, and then you report your scores to the tennis ladder coordinator each week and then you would either move up or down the ladder which is why it's called the ladder, so you'd either, you know, move up if you were winning or move a little bit down if you were losing, and then at the end of that season there was actually a playoff, so there was like a champion at the end, but it was literally beginning singles. And it's so funny because to this day, there was a woman that I matched up with really well. It was like she would win sometimes I would win sometimes. I played about seven or eight matches over that first season and at least 50% of my matches I played against her because we were so well matched, and I still see her on the courts around town to this day.

Erin:

And we have that great memory. We ended up on one team together, you know over the last 10 years, but that's how I kind of got to know her.

Carolyn:

Yeah, and I just played someone this past week who told me she started playing tennis because she joined a ladder and then they formed a team. She met a couple people through that ladder, formed a team. But if you're very new to tennis you could tell your friends there's this Try Tennis program out of North Carolina, but they have different things like it or similar to it in every state and do you remember it's a great deal. They give you like a racket and balls and a shirt and you get a certain number of lessons and it's a great way for your friends maybe to start who haven't ever touched a tennis racket before.

Erin:

Yeah, yeah, you can be an adult. You could be any age. You could be 25, 35, 65, it doesn't matter, you can start. We interview I talk about her a lot but we interviewed a woman, stephanie, a year at least a year or two ago and she had started when she was 56. That's right. And she just learned to play by hitting with her family because she wanted something to do with her family. So literally it does not matter.

Erin:

If people are listening that have friends that are interested in trying tennis, it does not matter what their age is. And what we also learned this week in Carolyn by hearing from all the southern states and I know it's a nationwide program. It may not be in every single city, but I know so many of the community tennis associations that have picked up that try tennis idea so they really are all over and then a lot of times that try tennis which you're saying you know you get a racket, lessons, a t-shirt. Then a lot of times in a lot of cities, there's another step called play tennis. Right, it goes from try tennis to play tennis. Yeah, something like that.

Carolyn:

I'm sure it's called something different.

Erin:

Yeah, more catchy, yeah, something more catchy. But basically it's like when you're ready to play in a league, they will set you up for that or competitive. It doesn't have to be part of a league, but it's some sort of competitive tennis against other people. Yes, so you will be taught all the rules. People should not be afraid to those, those people that are listening that are already playing tennis. If they have a friend, that's apprehensive to play because of whatever they don't know, they think they don't know. I went out after those lessons. There were some ladies playing on the court next to me and they were short a double, like one of the doubles. People didn't show up and they said Erin, you know, come over and hit. And I said I don't know how to keep score, like I was nervous. I want to know how to do something before I actually do it, because I don't want to fail.

Erin:

And I was like I didn't read over the tennis scoring yet and one of the ladies said if you have to read the rules, like you're in the wrong. You know this is for fun. Like you don't need to know how to score and you learn that just by being on a tennis court. You have to know how to say love, 20, 30, 30, 40, uh, deuce. You don't need the terminology to get out there, that's right.

Carolyn:

And the other thing that's great about the sport that I would tell to anyone just starting is that when you do start playing people, you're not going to play former college players out there. You're going to play people at your own level. So you'll start if you've never touched a racket before. But you know, if you started playing leagues, you're going to start as a two five player. So you don't have to go out there and even played someone that played in high school before you play someone at your level. And I don't know of another sport where you can start playing as an adult and you can play people at your same level. And so that's the part about tennis that I love the most is that I'm not playing a former college player. I'm. You know I'm playing someone at a. You know I'm playing someone at about the same level as me. That's really competitive.

Erin:

Comparable. That's a really good point. Yeah, I didn't think about that. As a player now that's played for almost 10 years I just know that. But a lot of people might not know that you're not going to go out on a tennis court and somebody is just going to be hitting winners at you. You're not going to know how to play. You're going to be out there with the yeah, almost exact same level as yourself, because even if you sign up for lessons people that teach lessons, pros that teach lessons like after my lessons, the pro that I took lessons from connected me with other women that were at my exact same level. So we started meeting at lunchtime just to play doubles, like once a week or twice a week. We would just text each other or have a sign up and we would just meet and play at lunchtime. But he connected us. So you don't have to know all the right people to start out. You just need to be willing to go out, to go out there. Yeah, that's great.

Carolyn:

So Aaron played tennis with a woman who is fabulous, named Paula Hill, who used to be the president of Southern. And what was it that she said to us? Erin, if each of us that plays would find one more friend to play, we would double the number of people playing tennis.

Erin:

Yeah, paula is a huge advocate for getting people to play that start at any age, pick up a racket, get out on a court, because, you know, it's not only the sport that we love, but I think most people just fall in love with being out there making friends, the social aspect of it. It prolongs your life, like there's so many mental health benefits to it. Right, right, tennis is just the vehicle. Right, tennis is just the vehicle really for all the other great things that come out of it. But, yeah, paula, paula is a huge advocate to get people out there and she says, yes, if every one of us would ask a friend, we could double our sport, and that's really what we're trying to do.

Erin:

Yes, I actually know a woman that did exactly that. She had a couple ladies in her neighborhood that she knew were former athletes, you know, like 20 years prior, and she wanted to start playing tennis. I think she had just taken like a lesson and loved it right away. So she asked a couple of her neighbors to play and I met them well after and I thought, oh, they probably have been playing for a long time and I said, how did you get started? And they was like oh, our neighbor just said you should try to. You should, you know, try playing tennis. And now those ladies are like high level, three fives, yes. Like I literally thought they had been playing since they were kids because they're so good. And they started just like I did, which was like had never played before, had been athletic, done other things, but just started playing as adults. And now they're just phenomenal and they're like scary to play on a court because they're so good. Yes.

Carolyn:

Yes, I know who you're talking about. So yes, they are scary to play against. We hope everyone listening encourages at least one person to play. Erin and I recently played red ball at the USTA Southern Annual Meeting. So if you're a little worried about getting out there and actually playing tennis, red ball is a little bit easier and it's a lot of fun. Also, if you want to start playing tennis but aren't sure who to contact, please let us know. You can message us on our website, which is SecondServePodcastcom. Thanks so much for listening and hope to see you on the court soon. You.