Alamo Heights High School students put on free tennis clinic for children

Members of tennis team meet twice a month

ALAMO HEIGHTS, Texas – Annabelle, Adriana, Peyton and Naomi are all part of the Alamo Heights High School tennis team. They have worked very hard to get where they are in the sport of tennis and say they have learned so much from it.

It’s why for the past year, they wanted to share their love for the sport with others through a free clinic.

“I grew up playing tennis with my dad when I was younger,” Annabelle Zacher, a senior at Alamo Heights High School said. “And I thought, why not be able to teach tennis to other children?”

Adriana Kell, a junior on the team said she knew she wanted to do this with some of her fellow teammates because she believes tennis is a sport that isn’t just good for your physical health, but also overall for your emotional well-being and character.

“It forms your character and it teaches you patience and endurance,” Kell said. “And so it showed me that not everything comes like, right when you want and you have to work hard over lots of months and then you can get what you want.”

Adriana said tennis can be perceived as an expensive sport, but she believes there are ways to play at a more affordable cost.

“We want to show people that tennis isn’t all about the money and it’s accessible to all,” Adriana said. “And I think everyone should have the opportunity to play if they want. You can rent for very minimal money and rackets you can get from hand-me-downs. And we just want to prove to people that you can play it, no matter what.”

The clinic called “Serves for Love” is for children ages five-years-old to middle school, where they teach students the basics of the sport -- like how to hit ground strokes, how to old a racket and how to get the ball over the net.

“This one girl, she was probably four,” Peyton Pritchard, another senior at Alamo Heights high school said. “She had to stand so close to the net, but she got it over for the first time and she was just so excited. And it was just so great to be able to see them learning and being excited about what they’re learning.”

Their overall goal is to teach kids the values of tennis, but most importantly help them make life-long relationships.

“Just kids, making friends, being happy, saying, you know, I want to come to this clinic and out there just parents putting them into them in it,” Naomi Sutin, a sophomore said. “But yeah, overall making friends and wanting to be there, wanting to learn.”

You can check out the free clinic Serves for Love at the FIT Tennis Center in Windcrest every other Sunday, from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. To find updates on the clinic, you can check their Facebook page.


About the Author:

Sarah Acosta is a weekend Good Morning San Antonio anchor and a general assignments reporter at KSAT12. She joined the news team in April 2018 as a morning reporter for GMSA and is a native South Texan.