Tennis provides many life lessons that senior Jeff Berry hopes the at-risk kids coming through the Mentor TennisSee program he established while a student at Vanderbilt will carry with them for years to come.
“There are many crossover skills between tennis and life,” Berry said. For example, in most tennis matches, there are no officials and the players enforce the rules alone. “You’ve got to learn how to be civil, how to be cordial, how to make proper line calls. We teach the kids the right way to be a good competitor.”
Mentor TennisSee links tennis instruction with academic tutoring and life-skills development for children who would otherwise have no exposure to the game. The students, mostly middle-school aged from Metro Nashville Schools, meet three times weekly for two-and-a-half hours.
During the tutoring sessions, participants get one-on-one help with homework and prep-work for standardized testing. Tutors communicate with teachers and parents, and progress is logged after each session.
Although Mentor TennisSee is staffed primarily through Vanderbilt students and community volunteers, some of the tennis instruction is provided by amateur coaches, local tennis professionals, Vanderbilt coaches and, occasionally, touring professional coaches.
The life-skills mentoring comes through a program called First Serve Life Skills. The best students have the opportunity to participate in the First Serve National Student Athlete Competition.
Berry grew up playing tennis competitively in Philadelphia and dreamed of one day helping kids who didn’t have the same good fortune of private lessons and top-quality instruction.
“When I got to Vanderbilt, I saw that Nashville did not have a strong tennis and academic program for inner city kids. And given the resources we have at Vanderbilt and the resources we have in the city, it made a lot of sense to bring a program like that to Nashville,” he said.
Initially, the program was centered at Vanderbilt in the Brownlee O. Currey Jr. Tennis Center, but during the winter the students met and played at Metro Nashville’s Hadley Park, which has a “bubble” for climate control and an existing tennis program targeted toward the type of at-risk youths served by Mentor TennisSee.
“The partnership with Hadley has allowed us to reach out to more kids,” Berry said. Partnering with LEAD Academy, a local public charter school, was a good fit, too, since LEAD seeks community partnerships to advance educational goals.
All of the kids in the program are at risk socially or economically. LEAD helps identify those who would benefit from the program as does another partner, YMCA Urban Services. A third program, Vanderbuddies, helps connect the kids with willing tutors.
In recent months, Berry has been working feverishly to ensure Mentor TennisSee’s long-term survival, establishing a board and securing grants, in part to endow a Vanderbilt scholarship for a professional or graduate student to oversee the program. “In order to make this work long-term, we need someone to champion this and focus on bringing it to the next level,” he said.
Berry is not a college-level tennis player nor is he an education major. He graduates in May with a degree in history and is headed to an investment banking job with Morgan Stanley in New York City. He plans to stay on the Mentor TennisSee board after graduation.
“I’m confident this is going to continue to be a strong local partnership,” he said. “My role is to make sure this coalition that we worked so hard to build remains.”
For more information, visit www.mentortennissee.org. Additional contact information is listed on the web site.
Media Contact: Ann Marie Owens, (615) 322-NEWS
Annmarie.owens@vanderbilt.edu