How Tennis Builds Community | Well+Good

She knew Palmer Park was the place to go. That was where tennis players, and Black tennis players particularly, rallied and practiced and located one another in Detroit. Sure enough, an older man named Jerry made a spot for King, and so she learned to play tennis under the tutelage of the Palmer Park community.

“They only took me under their wing,” King says. “They saw that I desired to play, and I truthfully cannot remember how—I do know I didn’t ask anybody, you realize, ‘Can I play tennis with you?’ It just type of happened.”

Today, King leads the People for Palmer Park Tennis Academy, a component of the non-profit she founded that helped save Palmer Park when the town threatened to shut it down. Against the backdrop of a sport that’s been historically inaccessible to lower-income people and folks of color, King’s work as a tennis academy teacher and community leader is demonstrating how tennis—and particularly, tennis in public spaces—will help diversify the game, and show that tennis builds community in unexpected ways.

“It’s really cool to know you can bring people together,” King says. Despite the proven fact that tennis academy members compete against one another in practice and in tournaments, parents and families have develop into friends, and the children have learned to have one another’s backs, each on and off the tennis court. “They’re supportive of one another,” says King.

King’s first summer playing tennis, and in the highschool summers that followed, she played on the park all day, every single day, from nine within the morning to nine within the evening. After graduation, she became the primary Black tennis player at Western Michigan University, and was a part of the top notch of Title IX athletes to receive a Division 1 tennis scholarship.

After college, King continued to play in tournaments for fun, though she never competed professionally. Palmer Park remained at the middle of her tennis life, but just in a recreational capability—until 2010, when the town unveiled a plan to shut 77 of the town’s parks, including Palmer, the town’s third largest park. King knew she, and the neighborhood, couldn’t lose the park, in order that they took motion.

“Me and a few the tennis players got together and we had a protest,” King says. After garnering attention from television stations and community members and leaders, they were able to save lots of the park, and eventually founded the People for Palmer Park non-profit, by which they act as “caretakers for the park.” King began the People for Palmer Park Tennis Academy with around 30 students; today it has a pair hundred kids every summer. The Academy raises money and receives funding from the United States Tennis Association (USTA), in an effort to help provide funding for folks in order that their children can have access to tennis.

“I’ve tried to make it economically accessible because tennis continues to be a really expensive sport,” King explains. It requires equipment and travel all around the country (and world) to play in tournaments. The academy has had such fundraising and enrollment success that in 2020, the USTA named it the National Community Tennis Association of the Yr—an honor which King received from none apart from Billie Jean King herself.

“Billie Jean King—my idol after I was growing up playing tennis—gave me the award,” King says.

But this success story that exemplifies how tennis builds community was on no account a given. Palmer Park and its tennis facilities were built when the park’s surrounding neighborhood was predominantly white. Only amid white flight did the neighborhood and park patrons develop into predominantly Black, resulting in the expansion of the Palmer Park community that originally took King under its wing (today, the encircling neighborhood and park patrons are racially and socioeconomically diverse, says King). Town never originally intended to take a position in tennis courts for Black residents, as is usually the case for minority neighborhoods that lack public green space. And when King founded the tennis academy, she and the organization undertook extensive lobbying and fundraising to rehabilitate cracked and neglected courts. However the work, and the investment, have paid off. Today, the Palmer Park courts are a real community hub.

Along with playing and traveling together, Academy members do cultural activities and outings around the town. King can be captivated with teaching tennis to young people, and young people of color, because she says the way in which you could have to make use of your brain and your body in tandem—at all times moving and adjusting to fulfill the challenge before you—is sweet preparation for an individual’s whole life. She also thinks the Academy community is beneficial because as a Black competitor, it might probably feel isolating to go on the road and compete as certainly one of just a few people of color at a tournament. The Academy provides a support system, and allows players to assist increase representation in the game.

“They’re just kids, in order that they may be real competitive,” King says. “But I also attempt to instill the proven fact that in addition they need to be supportive of one another because tennis is usually a lonesome sport. We’re all this one big community, and I actually need them to embrace that. You identify lifelong friends on this game.”

Because of people like King, and the USTA’s investment in public tennis initiatives like hers, the USTA says that participation by diverse groups in tennis has increased significantly during the last three years: It has increased by 90 percent amongst Latino/Hispanic people, 46 percent in Black/African groups, and 37 percent in Asian/Pacific Islander populations. But for tennis to achieve these communities, and foster connection inside and amongst them, places like Palmer Park must exist, and thrive.

“We want this public space,” King says. “Otherwise, it just would not have happened.”