Creating opportunities for youth, on and off the court

New York Junior Tennis & Learning was founded in 1971 with the goal of empowering children through the sport of tennis and serves 90,000 young people in the five boroughs. What makes this organization unique is the goal of making tennis, a sport typically thought of as being for the wealthy, accessible to underserved youth. The organization also helps young people through tutoring and navigating admissions processes.

New York Nonprofit Media spoke with Udai Tambar, president and CEO of New York Junior Tennis & Learning, about the organization’s mission and programming, and how he hopes the U.S. Open will inspire more kids to play tennis. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This is an exciting time to focus on tennis with the U.S. Open happening this week and you’re at the Open now. How do you hope the tournament influences more youth to pick up a racket?

The game of tennis is becoming more and more diverse. New York City is an extremely diverse city, and I think the more young people you have who can see role models that look like them on the tennis court, the more inspired they will be to pick up a racket or want to play. At the U.S. Open, there’s going to be excitement. We hope that they’ll join one of our programs to learn to play the game. There’s a lot of buzz. There’s a lot of marketing on the subways, bus stops, you go out throughout the city, there’s always something tennis related. We’re hoping that sort of awareness will reach many of the young people that we’re also trying to reach.

How does New York Junior Tennis & Learning connect with the U.S. Open each year?

Sometimes our young people are ball kids at the event. Sometimes they’ll be part of what we call activations or events with some of the sponsors for the Open. Just the other day, there was Yonex doing something where kids got a chance to meet with some tennis players and hit. Around the Open, a lot of different brands are in New York. They’re trying to do different events to engage the kids, so that helps our young people as well. We try to take our staff out as well to the Open. We’re a tennis organization, so it’s a nice team-building exercise as well. There’s different events that the U.S. Open tries to do to engage the community and our young people participate in those events as well.

You work with youth through a variety of free programs, both at your flagship tennis center, the Cary Leeds Center, and across the city. What are the range of opportunities your organization provides for young people?

One is our comprehensive school-based after-school programs. We’re in about 30 different schools. This is where we’ll do tennis, homework, health, free snacks, STEM activity, dance, a host of different work. These school-based programs are trying to do more around mental health as well. We have a community tennis program, which is sort of a grassroots tennis program in schoolyards and parks throughout the city where it’s free as well for young people to participate. In the summer, we’ll have about 35 different sites, in the winter, fewer sites that are indoors. We have a Cary Leeds Center that’s in Crotona Park. There we’ll have programs for the local communities, one of the poorest congressional districts in the country, the park is surrounded by NYCHA housing. We try to cater to the local community. We also have a program called school time tennis, where we train PE teachers on how to teach tennis in their gym classes. We provide equipment and instruction on site as well. And we’ve been partnering with USTA Eastern to help extend that. We also have a program we call our Scholar Athlete Program, where young people try out. It’s based on your academics; we look at report cards. There’s an on court tennis tryout, and we look at family income as well, because we want to target the low-income communities. That happens at our Cary Leeds Center. We have a Queens site and now we’re expanding to a site in Brooklyn as well.

You have free after-school programs in over 30 locations across the city in neighborhoods that have sizeable low-income populations. Amid the pandemic you incorporated mental health support in this program to assist students. Why was that important to you?

Coming out of the pandemic, or on the tail end of the pandemic, we realized fairly quickly that you can’t get young people to focus on tennis or on homework unless you were going to address their mental health needs, because they were showing up with those needs. We have a full-time social worker on staff, which is something new. We’ve only done it in the last few years. We’re partnering with local social work schools like Hunter and Columbia and placing their students in our schools. We’re trying to do more and more of this work with the young people we serve in the schools. We’ve been also looking at what we can do with our coaches and our other programs. We had a partnership with the U.S. Soccer Foundation on how they do trainings for coaches being mentors. We did that through partnership, having trained our coaches as well, so that they can be better at identifying some of the needs of the young people and better supporting as well.

How does tennis promote resilience and mental health of youth?

Generally, it’s a great sport because it’s a nice balance of an individual sport, but you’re still part of a community. When you’re out on the court, there’s a tremendous amount of grit and perseverance that you have to exhibit to succeed. You have to practice. You have to learn how to handle defeat. You have to learn how to handle victory, as well as sportsmanship. There can be many highs and lows in a match, and you have to sort of dig deep, and those skills translate to other aspects of life as well. At the same time, when you’re part of a program, you’re part of a community. So you’re not at tournaments alone. There are other people from the program. They’re supporting each other, consoling you if you’re lost, helping you rebound, helping you celebrate your successes as well. There’s just great individual and team life lessons you learn that carry over to many aspects of life.

New York Junior Tennis & Learning was founded by tennis legend Arthur Ashe in 1971. How has the organization changed since those founding days?

The game has evolved. We’re much larger than we were back then. We have more sites, we have more program offerings, but I think the DNA of the organization remains the same, which is we work with young people to help them succeed on and off the tennis court, and that was very important to Arthur. We believe education is helpful. We’ve always done more than tennis, and we continue to develop in that direction. The second way we’ve been consistent is the strong belief that talent is universal, but opportunity is not and we’ve just tried to make inroads into different communities where tennis might not be a sport commonly watched or played. There might not even be tennis courts in certain communities. We take it upon ourselves to sort of create the opportunities to engage with the game there. We’ll create tennis courts in schoolyards, in gyms and cafeterias to engage young people. In some ways, I’d say we’re probably very similar to what we were 50-plus years ago. 

Your organization also has a Scholar Athlete Program for high-level students and tennis players seeking to play tennis in college or even go pro. Could you tell us about the program and your vision for its growth?

We wanted to create a program which valued excellence on the court and off the court, meaning on academics equally, and we wanted to provide this to families with limited resources. We launched this program two to three years ago. It began with 65 students and went to 75 this past year. This coming fall, it’ll be 85 and what we do is, you play tennis, could be two to four days, depending on your sort of skill level, we provide a travel stipend. We provide support for tournament fees to cover that. On the academic side, we provide free SAT prep, free Specialized High School Admissions Test prep. But I think just as importantly, we really focus on sort of guidance on key transitions for young people. So if you’re in elementary school, we’ll work with you one on one with family on how to apply to middle school. How do you identify the right middle schools? How do you navigate the application process? Because middle school is a citywide process, it’s not just about your local zone school, and a lot of families don’t know how to do that. The (Department of Education) has tremendous, tremendous resources within the school system, but you just need to know how to access them. Same with middle school students, we’ll work with families on how to apply for high school. Some schools require essays, some schools will require a video, sometimes it’s an audition, sometimes you’re sitting for a test. We work with them, help them sort of prioritize where they want to be, and then obviously, for transition from high school to college, we will work with them on how to apply for financial aid. We’ll work with certain coaches if some of our young people are going to Division I colleges or planning to play tennis in college. We’ll work with the college coaches to make sure that our kids have exposure.

What is your hope about the lasting impact of the U.S. Open on young people’s interest in tennis?

What I really hope that they do is make the game more accessible to young people (who) normally don’t think that tennis is for them. The more the game is celebrated, the more it’s out there, it’s better for us because it’s easier for us to have conversations with parents and the children about giving the game a try. Most often, when they try it, they get hooked. Then you’re part of a larger community, where you could access so many more resources and use that as a springboard to further success in life.