Takeaways
1. Overall the league was a big success. I plan to do it again and would recommend any club that's looking to get young players competing to give it a try.
2. Next year I will consider doing a 1 hour face-to-face training with the parents in addition to putting them through the digital course. I say this because it was evident that several of the parents did not bother to go through the course or not very thoroughly. I think if I have the course prepared for them and then spend just one hour on court with them, I could get them up to speed pretty quickly.
3. I plan to send email reminders every week about 3 days before the match day. We had pretty good reliability, but there was one week when one team did not show up and never called.
4. I ended up hiring a young pro to be on site during the league play. This did not cost the club much money but it helped with little things like teams that couldn't find the right equipment or teams that didn't know where they should be going to play and things like that.
5. One thing I plan to do again is to make the local High School coaches aware of this league. We had several of them that were excited that we were doing it and they helped us get the word out to their Elementary School kids. This is a no-brainer for them because it only helps them fill their pipeline for who will eventually be on their high school teams.
6. We did not require anyone to be a member of our club to play nor did the non-members have to pay a higher rate. That's unusual for us but we felt with this introductory program we wanted to cast a wide net and reach the most kids possible. We plan to do that again next year.
7. Matches were played for 1 hour, but we had 30 minutes before and afterwards to set up and tear down the red ball equipment. One of the best things we did was explain to the players, the parent coaches, and the spectators watching, that they were expected to help us set up a tear down and it went really quick.
8. We definitely will keep using the red ballcourt and ball because it was definitely helpful to some of the newer players. Even more experienced players that can play with their orange ball were able to have fun and play competitive points on the red court.9. We plan to do a follow-up survey with all the parents who had the kids play to see what their thoughts were and if they would be interested in having those kids play in future leagues.
10. Remember, even if you don't have the ability to create a course like I did, you can still send out videos or even do all the training in person with your parents.
I hope you all give this league a try and are able to get more younger tennis players on the court competing and not just practicing.
