For of those to whom much is given, much is required.

John F. Kennedy

The SWF uses tennis as a hook with children to deliver on our mission. The children we serve are challenged by many situations; single-parent homes, families with significant health issues, no discipline at home while living in neighborhoods and going to schools that expose the children to many forms of trauma. The early years of a child’s life, school-age children (ages 6-13), present a unique opportunity to foster healthy psychological development. Psychological development refers to cognitive, emotional, intellectual, social, and moral capabilities.

The sport of tennis has a number of unique demands that are much different relative to other sports. Several of the demands include:

• The player’s brain must make hundreds of thousands of split-second calculations to make contact with the ball and in a way that will result in the ball traveling back to the intended point in the opponent’s court.
• Player’s are all alone with little or no coaching allowed.
• There are no timeouts or substitutions, etc.

Tennis specific stressors represent an extraordinary field of demands that can be leveraged to accelerate psychological development. In the case of children exposed to traumatic events help to minimize its effect of trauma on these children’s psychological development. There are few sports that offer such a diverse array of opportunities for psychological development as tennis.