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Serve It Up 1: Fresh Approaches to Get Newbies Hooked on Tennis
Extraordinary coaches with amazing ideas and methods
Rich Neher
November 28, 2024
This is the first article in a new series about racquet sports coaches and their successful approaches to growing the game and getting people playing. This issue is all about tennis but I’m sure we’ll cover all racquet sports in the future. This month, the tennis coach is Adam Friel of Western Tennessee.
Who is Adam Friel?
In mid-November, I had the opportunity to speak with coach Adam Friel, following a recommendation from California Coach Susan Nardi.
Adam used to work at the John McEnroe Tennis Academy at Sportime in New York, and at Tennis Memphis, a nonprofit organization that manages several City of Memphis public tennis centers.
 Adam Friel | Adam has become a leader in the tennis industry in two ways. Keep it simple and the client as the priority as much as possible. He has run adult, U10, high-performance, and recreational programs, he has coached juniors who have won national championships and reached inside the top 50 in the country as well as customized and strung rackets for ATP and WTA players. |
One of his favorite sayings is if it’s not fun, challenging, or helping you grow then why are you doing it?
If it’s not fun, challenging, or helping you grow
then why are you doing it?
Adam has been accepted into the USTA’s ‘Racquet Sports Management Apprentice Program’ run by Jason Allen at the National Campus in Orlando, Florida. The program starts in January, and I’m sure we will hear from him about his journey to become a better coach.
Leftwich Tennis Center, Memphis, TN
Adam writes about his time at Leftwich: “When you build a brand new 36-court court facility, there’s a lot that needs to happen to fill those courts. You need to create clinics, leagues, tournaments, private/group lessons, as well as special events and socials. You need to have open play time as well as create opportunities for outreach to let everyone know what kind of fun they’re missing out on!”
 Leftwich Tennis Center | For the Leftwich Tennis Center in Memphis, Tennessee, we had a great approach to make all of that happen. We created great public clinics, provided great private and group lessons, worked with a ton of local USTA teams to create practice times, and ran some really fun special events, tournaments, and socials. It did an amazing job of capturing the interest of the players in the area, but I wanted to make sure we started using our amazing momentum to capture a bunch of brand-new players who had never tried tennis. We ran 6-week game-based beginner programs using red, orange, and green balls in partnership with the USTA Tennessee, which was a huge hit! |
We were able to get over 300 brand-new players in our first year just from that alone! Being at this amazing brand new facility that just won the facility of the year award, bringing 300 new players into the sport, and averaging over 1000 players taking a clinic a month wasn’t good enough.”
Beale Street Tennis Initiative
About halfway through my first year, I had a great mentor named Paul Goebel, who I would always talk with about new ideas and different things that are done in the city. If anybody knew about what was going on in Memphis it was him. We came up with the idea to do an event on Beale Street at the same time as the Memphis Grizzlies home opener.
With the help of Gwyn Fisher, the Chief Economic Development Officer at the Greater Memphis Chamber, we were able to get in touch with the Beale Street management group and the Memphis Grizzlies to do the event during their home opener of the 2024 season.
Help from the USTA Tennessee
We brought out about 10 mini red nets, foam balls, red balls, and 25” rackets and had about 15 coaches helping out. We collaborated with USTA Tennessee, Wilson, and the Memphis Grizzlies to make this a super memorable event.
We had so many players from our club show up to show their support as well as somewhere around another 200 players coming to try out tennis on the street on their way to the FedEx Forum. The event was a blast!
Wilson sponsored us with some great giveaways to grow the game, USTA helped give us the equipment and the Grizzlies even gave us some awesome prizes too!
Going out into the community is key
When it comes to growing the game and your club, it’s super important to not only host events at your facility but to go out into the community and engage with people who might never try it because they’ve heard things that tennis is too hard or too expensive. You might not make them a member at your club right away, but down the road, after some practice, you never know who is going to take your Thursday night live ball!
Do you have your own story to tell? How are you getting newbies into tennis or other racquet sports? Please contact Rich and share your experience, your idea, and your wisdom. Thank you!