With great agility, speed and harmony, the young tennis players move around the tennis court. Showing off their sporting skills, they competed in a tournament at Crotona Park in the Bronx on Wednesday.
“I love this sport,” says Adriana Padilla, 11, who has participated in the New York Junior Tennis and Learning after-school program for two years.
“I focus a lot on the movements I do and I focus a lot on how I can improve,” adds Adriana.
The program teaches young students, from the age of 5 and up, how to practice the sport of tennis. Padilla was there with his 8-year-old brother, David, who is following in his footsteps and learning quickly.
“The first is like this, and then the second is if he’s next to you, like this,” David explains.
Although they practice throughout the year, this tournament is in part to get junior players excited about the US Open tennis tournament, preparing them for the excitement of the event that they are very much looking forward to.
“It’s the biggest tournament in the world in tennis and there are a lot of famous people who are going to play there.”
The program is designed so that children can learn: in this tournament they compete on smaller courts than the regulation ones.
“What we try to do when dividing the tracks is that the children have a dimension of the track proportional to their height and their strength”, says Yesica de Lucas, director of Training Method.
In addition to keeping the children active and learning about the sport played around the world, the program also helps them with their studies.
“They pay more attention to the different school lessons. They concentrate more. And I think that learning tennis and playing tennis calms them down. You know, their character and their patience,” says Victor Ayudant, director of Tennis at the institution.
As they prepared to play, Adriana expressed her admiration for Irene, her current coach and a famous tennis player.
“My dream is to be like a teacher, like my teacher coach Irene or like Selena Williams. These two are my inspirations”.
The junior players come from ten different schools from around the city, but they all have big dreams, and maybe one day we’ll see them play at the US Open.
2023-08-17 16:03:00
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