SPRINGFIELD — Third graders Kamila Garcia and Sighyah Cooke stood side by side, tennis rackets in hand and waited for Jake Agna to serve. Both girls hit the tennis balls, swiftly bouncing them on the floor of Glickman Elementary School’s gymnasium.
“I think tennis is cool because you can bounce the ball over the net,” Kamila said.
“It’s a little hard, but I hit some of the balls and it’s fun,” Sighyah said of the 40 minute lesson where she learned the basics of tennis from Agna and the crew from Kids on the Ball, a nationally acclaimed tennis program that has been visiting Springfield elementary schools since 2017.
The program was founded 18 years ago by Agna in Burlington, Vermont and focuses on introducing the game of tennis to children living in urban, often impoverished communities. The program has even expanded to Cuba.
“Kids on the Ball is about opportunity and about learning the game and having fun” he said. “We use tennis as a way for a person to be socialized and learn to be a productive citizen. Sports helped me and has helped a lot of people grow up and sports can be really valuable,” Agna said.
Besides Dennis Nelson, the physical education teacher at Glickman, who helped teach the students, Kids on the Ball Executive Director Shona Mossey and team members Kevin Plette and Gregg Meyer also worked with the first, second and third graders at the school who were pumped and ready to play at 9:30 a.m. Thursday. This year Chadiah Haywood, a senior at Putnam Vocational Technical Academy was also on-hand to help students.
“We love having them here and what I’ve realized is that this is not so much about tennis, but about getting kids active and moving,” Nelson said. “Many of them have never played the game and it exposes them to a healthy, fun hobby.”
Mossey said unlike many sports tennis doesn’t require a lot of equipment.
“You give a kid a racket, a few tennis balls and they get the chance too learn a sport they can play their whole lives,” she said.
Marley Rivera, 9, said she has played the game before and went on to describe some of the rules for a quickfire group tennis match set up by Agna.
“We learned how to catch the ball and hit the ball,” she said. “It’s pretty fun to play.”
The program has visited nine elementary schools in Springfield and provides portable nets, tennis balls and racquets for the students to use. Mossey said she would love to partner with local businesses and organizations to expand the program to more schools in the city.
For Agna the program has turned into more than he could have ever imagined.
“I had a very successful club with a tennis program teaching kids who could afford to play,” he said. “That first summer in 2000 we took 20 scholarship kids and it just exploded. Within a couple years it became a huge program for people who couldn’t afford to play whether they live in Section 8 housing, belong to a youth center or a school in a struggling community.”
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