Jay Neal
Jacksonville Daily Progress
JACKSONVILLE —
The last sports camp of the summer was held this week as the second and final session of the annual Indian Tennis Camp was staged at the Jacksonville High School Tennis Complex.
Under the supervision of David Hanna, the camp divided its participants into elementary school and middle school/freshman groupings to facilitate a smoother instructional process for the local youth.
Hanna stated that he was pleased with the campers in attendance and that everyone seemed to benefit from the cooler temperatures that graced the area this week.
“We’ve had a nice group of kids to work with (here) in the second session of camp,” Hanna said during a brief break in action on Wednesday morning. “We’ve also had a break from the weather as it hasn’t been nearly as hot as it normally is this time of year and the kids have come out here with a great attitude and have worked extremely hard. They have been very attentive throughout and have been good to work with.”
Hanna said the primary focus of the training classes was to spend time on each of the fundamentals of tennis while also working on how to play the game as well.
“Our idea is to teach fundamentals of the game,” he said. “We break it down to five strokes: forehand ground strokes, backhand ground strokes, forehand volley, backhand volley and the serve.
“Each day we’ve been worked on a couple (of different) strokes and then once we had the strokes down we begin to work on playing the game.”
Hanna went on to add that he believes the camp will also serve to transition the older players into high school tennis seamlessly.
“They (the older students) getting a nice jump on the season by being at camp,” he said. “A lot of the things we do here in camp we will be doing when fall practice next week (Monday), so they will be ahead of the game.”
Hanna said the amount of individual instruction time that each camper received was greatly enhanced by the number of volunteers that so freely gave of not only their time, but their willingness to share their tennis knowledge with the youngsters.
“This camp would not be possible without its volunteers,” Hanna said. “Chuck Roper (a physical education instructor at Eastside Elementary) has been a tremendous help all summer with the city clinics and helping out in both sessions of the Indian Tennis Camp. He’s a big asset to our program.
“Also, we’ve had a good turnout of varsity tennis players that have been helping this week. It’s strictly volunteer and they (the varsity tennis players) came out on their own to help.”
One of those varsity volunteers, Juanita Holguin, shared the following thoughts on the giving of her time.
“I feel it is important to help the little kids out and the camp is very worthwhile because it gets the little kids out of the house and it gets them started into tennis, which is healthy.
“It’s been a little bit tiring this week, but it has been a lot of fun.”
