Beginning at 2:30 p.m. Thursday afternoon at Tupper high school, several dozen tennis players will gather for friendly competition. Everyone is welcome.
The laid-back tournament is the culmination of a grassroots effort to grow tennis on the East Side and curb the country club exclusivity associated with excellence and professional success in the sport. "Tennis is just an extreme example where it seems like, in Canada, if you don't have the money to join a club, you don't play the game--period," said John Mullen, a community coordinator at Tupper who sits on the board of MoreSports. A former junior stand-out in the 1970s with the perennial provincial champions from West Vancouver's Sentinel high school, Mullen was a member at Hollyburn Country Club. The majority of the school's players were members at the private club. "Hardly fair," Mullen said.
Ingrid Schneller (who was featured last week in a Courier article alongside her son) says tennis is an indicator of class and access. "The age-old socio-economic barriers to entry into high-performance tennis are alive and well, and those tennis players who happen to come from East Side homes, [who] attend schools such as Tupper, face tremendously low odds--despite their talent--of breaking into the upper ranks dominated by schools such as Sentinel, St. George's, Collingwood, and Victoria's Oak Bay," she said.
"You'd be better off in East L.A. than in East Side Vancouver," she added, pointing to the low-barrier tennis and tutoring academy run by Venus and Serena Williams in Los Angeles, CA.
Tennis players need time, space and a playing partner. "It's also a very hard game to learn and play," said Mullen, who notes new players can use larger, softer balls, half-courts and special racquets to develop their skill.
Schneller believes the answer is a public, city-wide youth league independent of an exclusive club. "You need matches to progress. They can take place on gritty public courts. But they need to happen somewhere."
--MS
