The Airdrie and District Tennis Association (ADTA) has received another award – this time from a national organization.
Tennis Canada announced last week that the ADTA had been selected as the 2010 Rookie Building Tennis Community during the presentation of its excellence awards, building on the individual Volunteer of the Year award from Tennis Alberta won by president Chris Simnett in November.
“I was pretty surprised, as I think there were 47 other communities that we beat out,” Simnett said. “I’m pretty happy about it and it’s nice to have the recognition, as we started from very little. For a year, there were no courts at all in Airdrie, after those condos got built by Genesis Place, and now we have a pretty vibrant little tennis scene.”
The award recognizes efforts to grow the game of tennis and positioning the sport as an important partner in the building of healthy communities.
Simnett has introduced tennis to more than 700 people in the community in the past year. Many of the those participants come from Ralph McCall School, where Simnett and a friend set up a tennis project for students in grades 1 to 5.
He has recently set up similar programs at R.J. Hawkey and Nose Creek schools and hopes to bring tennis into middle schools for one-day tournament sessions in the near future.
“It’s not finalized yet and what I’d like to see is tennis part of the phys-ed class, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen this year,” Simnett said. “We’re trying to get tennis into the schools to expose it to more kids.”
The ADTA hosted a Rogers Rookie Tour event last year, as well as a Groovy Girlz Tennis Camp and a sanctioned Junior Champs tournament. But Simnett is quick to point to out he didn’t do it all by himself. He said he was assisted greatly by the ADTA Board of Directors and the City of Airdrie, specifically community developer Michael McAllister.
“He’s done a lot for me, just paving the way and getting me in front of the people I need to be in front of,” Simnett said. “The City has been a great help. He’s been a constant through the whole thing.”
He’d like to see high schools adopt tennis into the Rocky View Sports Association, but said realistically it is still a long way off. The ATDA will launch an adult league in May and will host four Tennis Alberta-sanctioned tournaments, up from one a year ago, this summer.
The Airdrie Champs U-14 and U-18, featuring the top juniors in the province, will take place during the Victoria Day long weekend, May 20-22. There will be U-9 event tour stops on July 9 and Aug. 20, followed by the Airdrie Challenger on Aug. 26-28 and another visit by the Rogers Rookie tour.
“It’s very significant, as, first of all, the Champs event, has probably 70 kids playing in it,” Simnett said.
“I think it’s great for Airdrie. If they really love tennis and they want to go further then there will be opportunities for them – and I’m hoping those opportunities will be in Airdrie. My goal is eventually to have a high-performance group training in Airdrie, with eight to 10 kids who are playing the tournament circuit, trying to qualify for nationals. That would be awesome.”
With the Tennis Canada award, Simnett will also get to attend the 2012 United States Tennis Association’s community tennis development workshop in New Orleans in January.
“That’s not why I did it, but it makes me feel pretty good,” he said. “The initial idea was just to get people with a racquet in their hand.”
