To get your first taste of actual teaching, you have several options:
- Assist an experienced pro. Some tennis clubs hire rookie tennis teachers to work on the same court with a pro for a while, then start teaching beginner classes, usually with younger children.
- Teach in a summer public recreation program. Many towns hire good players as young as 17 or 18 to teach tennis. These classes are typically informal and geared toward beginners, mostly intended to give kids a taste of having fun with tennis. At the better programs, experienced instructors are on hand and classes are small, but very often, a young first-time instructor is in charge of the whole program, and, unfortunately, too many kids at once. If you get such a job, try to find a way to spread classes out so that you have no more than six kids per class, preferably four. Giving good instruction to larger classes than this is too difficult for many experienced teachers, let alone a first-timer. The USTA can help you learn how to organize and teach a large recreational program. It offers more than 150 Recreational Coach Workshops nationwide every year. These one-day, often free events focus on how to teach groups of beginners and advanced beginners.
- Many summer camps offer tennis as a minor activity and hire an inexperienced "tennis specialist" who runs the whole tennis program. For the right person at the right camp, being a counselor can be incredible fun. At many camps, tennis will be an elective activity, and you might not have the problem of oversized classes as you often would in a public recreation program. As a specialist, you might also be exempt from living in a cabin with a group of kids. If you want to teach tennis, you have to like kids, but you don't necessarily have to want to live with eight of them.
- Other general summer camps focus much more seriously on tennis as a major elective. The minimal qualifications for getting a job at a general camp with a big tennis program are less than those at a dedicated tennis camp, but if you've never taught tennis, you certainly will not be put in charge of the whole program, and even an assistant will often be expected to have some teaching or college playing experience. Some of these camps hire quite a large staff of tennis instructors and assistants.
- Dedicated tennis camps usually cater to players who take lessons year-round. They generally hire experienced teaching pros, but some, especially those that only draw from their local area, will hire an inexperienced teacher to assist with the younger children.
- In many smaller towns, high-school sports are a major center of attention, and it's not uncommon for a local star tennis player to find lots of families eager to have their kids sign up for lessons. If you are "famous" for your tennis in your home town, you might attract a good number of students just by posting some notices at the local courts and a few other public spots. Since you'll be entirely on your own, and your students will likely be eager to follow in your footsteps and become advanced players, it's especially important that you make sure you're prepared to give them quality instruction. You should put in more than the minimal preparation I described earlier.
Part Three looks at the best and the worst of life as a professional tennis instructor.
