The recipe for success on the tennis court and in life is brewing in Steamboat Springs, and tennis coach Kristyn Wykert loves it.
With its main ingredient being the USTA Colorado SERVES program, a whole lot of life and leadership skills sprinkled throughout and a great turnout of kids between the ages of 8-13 as the topping on the cake, wonderful things are happening at the Tennis Center at Steamboat Springs. The Steamboat Tennis Association, along with NJTL of Fort Collins and Tennis for Kids in Denver were selected as satellite program partners for 2018 and are set to receive grants and other support to help offset costs associated with running their SERVES program.
“SERVES is a great program just because the kids are working on more than just tennis,” said Wykert, who is also the girls’ tennis coach at Steamboat Springs High School. “It’s working on life lessons and what that means on and off the court.”
Partners Mentoring Youth in Routt County, a nonprofit, is a community partner in the SERVES program with the Steamboat Tennis Association. Their mission is to create and support one-to-one mentoring relationships between positive adult role models and youth facing challenges in their personal, social, and academic lives. Julia Luciano, lead case manager of the community-based mentoring program at Partners, said it was a natural fit for the Partners staff to become involved in teaching the life skills part of SERVES, an acronym for: Success, Education, Respect, Values, Excellence and Self-Confidence.
“Mentoring happens really naturally when it comes to sports and it seemed like a really natural fit. Along with tennis, there’s a lot of life skills involved,” Luciano said. “What we do here at Partners is we try to teach kids life skills that they might not be getting in their normal day-to-day lives, and so involving a sport with it was a really easy way to incorporate those life skills.”
Loretta Conway, volunteer administrator for SERVES, said Partners helped identify what children would be good to be in the program, provide transportation for those children and deliver the off-court life skills component.
“We’re all partners in this together,” said Conway, who added that an after-school program from one of the local schools and the Boys and Girls Club have also sent kids to the SERVES program. “It’s a real community effort. There’s a lot of different helpers trying to help get the kids here. Because we made it absolutely free to the families, we had budgeted and planned for 24 kids to come every week for an hour and a half. Once the word got out and there was a newspaper article about it, we had 47 kids register. We actually opened it up to two classes.”
Wykert said she likes SERVES because there is so much to teach kids and they’re fun to work with. “They want to learn and they’re so eager to take in what you’re teaching them,” Wykert said.
The first six-week session ran from March 25-April 29. She said three more six-week sessions will be held in May-June, July-August and probably September-October.
“We want them to commit to at least six weeks,” said Conway, who pointed out that she thought the team agreement contract the kids signed was creative during the kickoff of the first class. “It’s about character building. It’s about learning to trust each other in the group and speaking up for yourself in the right ways without losing your temper.”
Luciano said the kids are really loving the program.
“There are definitely some kids who stand out as potential tennis stars for sure, and it’s really cool to see them take the life skills that we teach at the beginning of the class and then incorporate those into their tennis skills,” Luciano said.
Luciano said the life skills taught during the first half of the 90-minute sessions were: team building, communication, perseverance, decision making, goal setting, integrity, self-esteem and friendship.
She said the integrity lesson was huge because of players having to serve as their own line judge during tennis matches.
“That integrity lesson was really interesting. We did a whole thing about what honesty looks like in your day-to-day life, and we played a game of being honest when nobody’s watching,” Luciano said. “To watch them take that and put it on the court was so cool.”
Luciano said the beauty of SERVES is that it reaches more than the kids only interested in tennis.
“We get kids who are really interested in sports and then kids who are there more for the social aspect of it or learning something new, and we’re able to reach both of those types of kids and wrap it all back around to how can you take this out on the tennis court,” she said. “How are you going to apply this to tomorrow or the next day or this summer?”
USTA Colorado is providing support and resources.
“I can’t say enough good things about USTA Colorado,” Wykert said. “It’s just a fantastic opportunity for these kids, and adding in the life lessons portion. It’s not solely tennis. USTA Colorado has done a phenomenal job with this program. We feel very honored to be one of the three sites in Colorado. Hopefully, it grows and they keep having more and more SERVES sites within Colorado. We want to try and make it a great experience for these kids coming in and try to keep SERVES coming back year after year. Most of these kids hadn’t stepped foot into the tennis center. They’re feeling welcomed. They’re feeling a part of this place. A few of them after SERVES, all they want to do is go out and keep playing tennis. ”
USTA Colorado’s role includes coaches’ training, leadership skills curriculum, program administrative consulting and on-court assistance/demonstrations to help enhance the program.
“I grew up here my whole life and I just walked into the tennis center a couple of months ago when we started this. It was always like that was a whole different world,” Luciano said. “Being able to bring that world to these kids who have probably never been in the tennis center was really, really amazing. Getting that grant and being able to share that with youth who would probably never play tennis has been really inspiring to watch on my end.”
Story by Tom Fasano
This story appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of Colorado Tennis