A Non-Profit Organization Serving SF Bay Area Children To Whom It May Concern:Please be advised that effective September 15, 2011 TennisForKids.org will be ending the 2011 season on lessons at Balboa Park with the goal of re-opening TennisForKids clinics in 2012. Since 2002 we have provided round the year free tennis lessons on Saturday mornings at Balboa Park to children from low to mid income families in San Francisco. Our organization is made up exclusively of volunteers, from our Board of Directors to our able instructors. For the last ten years we have met our mission statement: To provide San Francisco children with a fun-filled learning experience while imparting life lessons about the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, the advantages of discipline and focus, and tools to succeed in both sports and life. We have worked under the generous purview of the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department. We have attracted and affected children from all over San Francisco, with a focus on the Excelsior and outer Mission neighborhoods, and have had players come from the East Bay and Marin just to attend our clinics. In the years we have been in existence we have seen approximately 1,000 children benefit from our clinics, with about 90 % minority groups participating. We have received funding from the United States Tennis Association (USTA), the San Francisco Parks Trust, the Gay and Lesbian Tennis Federation (GLTF), private corporations (including Wells Fargo, IBM, E-trade and Providian), individual donors and foundations. We are a Community Tennis Association program and an organization member of the USTA. Our Directors, David A. Blair, Esq., David Martini and Jason Chu have served as Board members on the San Francisco Tennis Coalition and our current Co-Executive Director, David Martini, is the current President of the San Francisco Tennis Coalition and leading the fundraising effort to renovate the Golden Gate Park Tennis Complex. We have worked with the USTA, the GLTF, the SFTC, the San Francisco Parks trust, YTA (Youth Tennis Advantage) the San Francisco Neighborhood Parks Council, Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval, the Balboa Park Club (who have been very considerate in sharing the courts with us on Saturdays), and Recreation and Park employees. Over the years we have seen our children move on to other junior tennis programs, to high school tennis teams (including Lowell) to attending college and to the tournament competition level. We have seen countless children learn how to become proficient at the sport. We have seen smiles and laughter, footwork and forehands. We have had most of our gear stolen, then seen our story covered on Channel 5 news, and then seen the community come out to help supply us with new gear when we needed it. We have restructured our Board over the years and added and lost many volunteers and instructors. Throughout it all we owe a deep deep thank you to James Song who has been the most reliable and consistent of volunteers: A Super-Volunteer. Additional thanks to Jaime Blanco who volunteered until his own children took his attention elsewhere; to David Martini who has been a Board member since the outset; to Jason Chu who has been Board Member, Treasurer, volunteer Coach, public relations executive and everything in between; to Tiger Ginn for maintaining a high level of instruction for the last few years; to Nicholas Wickes for his enthusiasm and creativity; to long standing individual donors including the Blair Trust, Jason Misner, and Ms. Bruggman; to our sponsors and donors, including N. Rothenberg at Piedmont Tennis, S. Strecker at Babolat, Adidas, Mutual Power Tennis, K. Gilbert at ProKennex, and K3, Head, and Wilson and of course to all those parents that helped out and kept their kids motivated to play tennis when they could have been at home watching videos or outside causing mischief. You may be asking what next. Well as for our future plans we have no intention of going away. We are however restructuring. We will no longer be giving year round lessons. We are moving towards a season, like most sports, and ours will center around the summer when tennis is in full swing. We are likely to have free lessons to children during the spring months, and in summer we plan on providing low cost tennis camps that cover all levels of skill. The spring lessons will be intended to get interested children training in fundamentals and depending on level, other skills towards an eye to more significant efforts in the summer. We may be back to Balboa Park, but we may also be in your schools and in other communities in the Bay Area. For those of you interested in keeping up with our plans, or in helping our organization move forward please feel free to provide us with your contact information in person, by mail or by email so that we can let you know when the new clinics begin. Please keep up with changes at our website at tennisforkids.org. Should you have any questions or wish to contact us to assist our organization and the members of the San Francisco community we serve please do not hesitate to do so. I can tell you on a personal note, that it has been a tremendously positive experience for me to have participated in TennisForKids as Board Member, Executive Director, and most of all tennis instructor on the courts. I am looking forward to making Tennis For Kids an even better organization in the coming years so that we can impact even more children and families. I encourage all of you who have also had a positive experience with us or are interested in feeling the joy we all have gotten over the years to stay tuned.
Sincerely yours, |