By Shane Baker, President Delaware Club Tennis

As everyone knows, one of the most important aspects of running a successful club tennis program is the money. The more money you have to spend on your team, the cooler uniforms, or other apparel like hoodys, you can get, the more places you can travel to for tournaments or head-to-head matches, and the more people you can have on your team to spread the Tennis On Campus program. In the past, the most known fundraising tactics were the old fashioned car wash, the selling of the credit cards, or even working with a restaurant to split the profits for your work. While all of these might be effective in your areas, we can all agree that they aren’t the most exciting ideas out there.

A different way to look at the whole fundraising idea is to look at a way to use our skills in the things we love to do in a productive way. We all share in our love for the game of tennis, hence why we are all doing Tennis On Campus, so why not use our tennis skills to get use more money to expand our tennis ideas. An idea to use these skills that we all possess is running tennis clinics for kids around our area. Here is a little step-by-step on things that are important to running a successful fundraising clinic.

First off, a clinic cannot work without the kids to teach, so the most important aspect is to get the interest into the kids in your area. One way to do this is to talk to the principals at your local elementary schools and pitch them your idea about having tennis clinics hosted by your team for their children. Emphasizing that them learning tennis gives them another skill set to take into the world, a way to meet friends that also might like tennis, and maybe even start them up in a sport they don’t know much about. An even better pitch to the schools is to offer them a tennis clinic/tutoring idea, where their kids would come out to the courts, have a couple hours of tennis teaching through games or other drills, but then afterwards getting tutored by your team in subjects that they are either struggling in or just have homework in. This brings a more fun, yet educational aspect to your fundraiser, which is very important to the schools. And if the idea doesn’t go for one school, good thing there are plenty other schools in this country, and I’m sure there is one that will go for the idea.

After you get the interest from the schools and the kids, the next is to design the clinic in a productive way for the kids. Many of you I’m sure have worked in a tennis camp at some point in your life, so you probably have your own ideas and experiences to how to run a clinic. The most productive ways that have worked well for me are doing the “game drills” approach. For those of you who have not heard about that, it is not doing drills as in “Hit two balls and go to the back on the line,” it’s more of the playing a game that works on a specific shot. For example, I have attached a list of games with explanations that have worked for me over my years teaching. The game called blackjack is a perfect example of a “game drill.” You work on a specific shot, like the forehand, while at the same time the kids are in the mindset of trying to win the game rather than just get the ball in, which keeps the interest in the clinic.

Now that you have the core of the clinic, the kids and the agenda, the last thing you need is the toppings on the cake, the little things that add excitement to the clinic. A couple things that we have used are asking your Section coordinators for prize donations for the kids to win, like shirts, hats, water bottles, key chains, etc. Have winners of games get these prizes so the kids have things to remember from the clinic. Also, asking surrounding tennis facilities, or even your own varsity team, to donate some practice balls hoppers, and kid racquets to save on expenses of buying them and then never using them again. Another surprise we used was asking our school if we could have our school mascot show up for an hour or so to surprise the kids and bring up the atmosphere a little more. Usually the schools aren’t too expensive to rent the mascot for an hour. There are also many more ideas out there for you to think of, these are just some for you to use if you want.

Now you have the kids to teach tennis and help with their homework, the agenda of what your going to teach them, and the prizes and surprises for the kids to enjoy the few hours they are with you. Doing something like this is a lot more fun and exciting to do then selling credit cards so there probably won’t be a struggle to get your teammates to help out with. We usually charge $10 a kid, so if you get about 100 kids, there’s a pretty good payday for your team after only a few hours of fun. Good luck with your clinics in the future, and don’t be afraid to throw your own spin on it to make it even better.

Looking for games to play with kids? Click Here