2022 Fellowship Participants
Shelby Baron
If a future employer sees this player development, coaching and leadership fellowship on my resume, it makes me really stand out because I am learning so much throughout this fellowship about just the basics of coaching and all these theories about why we do the things we do on court.
Miheala Codreanu
Coaching, it's not just something that you're thrown into or because you play tennis, you can, all of a sudden, start coaching. It's a skill that needs to be taught and it's a skill that needs to be learned, and so this is what the fellowship is. It's teaching us coaches to be better coaches and take it to the next level.
Venecca Green
I thought about [the fellowship] for somebody else. Not necessarily me, but the more I read it, the more I believed that that was something that I should do. I have a couple of promising kids that I believed needed more than what I could give, and in reading what would be offered at the USTA National Campus, I wanted to come and see if I had what it took to be able to teach high-performance-level tennis. The ‘aha!’ moment was that I don't have to be a Division I player, or a professional player, to be able to go back and teach high performance.
Edik Pribitkin
This national campus is all about tennis, and you cannot find a better place to work in terms of the environment and in terms of people truly caring about what they do. You step in here, it's all about tennis and people are smiling. It's a happy environment. Every day I came to the fellowship, excited, motivated and happy to be around people that enjoy and love doing what I love doing as well. I think tennis and life, it mirrors each other so much and getting into it as a coach can really give you new insights and build new opportunities that might not otherwise have been there before and can really help you help other people grow.
Previous Pilot Program Participants
Alex Lycan
The Pilot Program really made the summer for me. I learned more during the meetings with industry leaders than I thought was possible in only an hour or so per meeting. I think that this program has greatly increased my teaching ability and I think that it has put me in a position where I feel confident in almost any situation on the tennis court. I think that this program will be extremely valuable in the future because it greatly decreases the time it takes to learn from just experience without the presence of a mentor and will allow future new pros to take relevant courses while getting the experience on court all in the same day.
Lark Foote
The fellowship under Craig Jones and Chris Michalowski helped me to grow as a tennis professional in a number of ways. The amount of experiences we were given to work with different tennis professionals on court, talk with various leading people within the tennis industry and to shadow top coaches had an immense impact on me in learning to grow and shape my coaching philosophy.
There were also numerous on-court workshops that we had with Craig Jones and one with Steve Keller. This helped to challenge me to think outside of the box on what I knew and come up with creative ways to put together lesson plans on the spot. I also learned the value of understanding how to progress not only a tennis drill, but the skill itself that I would be working on with the student.
This was extremely important and has helped me to stretch myself to think more deeply on what I am focusing on when teaching my students. Overall, the program was very helpful, challenging and stretching me to grow as an upcoming tennis professional in the industry.
Leah Newhof
The biggest help to me was my on court experience. Especially when we had to create labs and run our own lesson plan. Coming from the Hope PTM program, we had covered a lot of topics and spent time on court, but did not lead classes. This opportunity through the pilot program allowed for me to practice writing a lesson plan, execute it, and recognize what changes I could make to improve it.
Additionally, pursuing a career in tennis is not extremely common so I had some doubts about it. Listening to the guest speakers and their journey through the industry was helpful to see where tennis can truly take you. Lastly, we had a few assignments where we had to create certain documents, like a pamphlet for adults as an example. It is now very simple for me to find that doc
Samir Tewari
I had an overall fantastic experience. The biggest thing I got out of this program were the connections and the fact those connections were willing to mentor me this summer and help me learn. Jose Caballero and Paul Roetert are examples of that, and they let me come learn from him whenever I wanted to. They were also very good about letting me pick their brains. If I had to give one constructive criticism, it would be that the portfolio assignments be done right after the modules.
Apply for the Fellowship here. Application closes on March 3, 2023.
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