2024 Community Grant Awarded to Support Trenton New Jersey‘s NJTL “Queens of the Court Play Day”
Chris Grant
The Trenton New Jersey NJTL chapter opened 50 years ago in this Capital City. Twenty-seven percent of residents still live at poverty levels. Few of Trenton’s schools offer girls tennis instruction or competition. This NJTL offers education and mentoring programs for middle school students through high school students in addition to tennis instruction and competitive play. Examples include after-school tutoring, “steam events,” and student mentoring. This program has always had ambitions to help the City’s youth using the power and fun of tennis as a gateway to personal growth. Girls have always been underrepresented and harder to enlist. Arthur Ashe himself worked with this program, helping his good friend and native Trenton-born tennis player, the Honorable David Dinkins, who later became mayor of New York City. From the beginning, a broad group of area tennis players and parents volunteered and supported the program to be inclusive of Trenton’s diverse population and continuing local economic challenges.
The proposed NWTO Community Grant will support the Queens of the Court Play Day Kickoff Event this summer. The event will launch their explicit goal to increase the number of girls participating in the subsequent school year’s NJTL tennis instruction and safe, fun play. They have already identified the local schools who will help identify the Court Play Day participants and hopefully will continue the relationship with NJTL. They have identified two prominent women player mentors willing to participate and follow up the day as mentors. They already utilize the appropriate safe play trained tennis pros who believe tennis is the Gateway to the girls’ broader education, exposure to life skills and leadership, and to their “superpowers!”
They intend to emphasize tennis as a sport for girls to experience the pure enjoyment of teamwork, particularly among girls from differing backgrounds, and expose them to the concept of developing personal resilience, and the value of having a mentor. Organizers are mindful of research showing successful women attribute professional success in part to having played sports. They have already consulted the Mid Atlantic Girls Rule the Court program elements to distill elements of a tennis program of the planned Play Day using the short court Red Ball method in order to appeal to girls unfamiliar with the game. (Coincidentally, the Mid Atlantic Girls rule the Court received a 2024 NWTO community grant)
We look forward to watching the Queens of the Court Playday rollout and subsequent impact. Thanks, NWTO Members for your support for the NWTO Community Grant program!
