Hi,
I’m Jason Ambrose, Director and head coach of Ambrose Tennis Academy.
I have had a few questions asked recently so I thought I would take a minute to share them with you.
How old do you start children learning tennis? 🎾
While 5 years old is the most common start age the youngest I work with is 18 months, or once they’ve learnt to walk confidently and comfortably, these are parent assisted classes. What I do is teach them all the fundamentals they will be learning as they develop. Some examples are activities like dropping and catching a ball, throwing, balancing (both with a racquet and ball and balancing their own body such as standing on one leg), holding a racquet, guiding and trapping the ball, running and different footwork skills and all of these activities have stages of complexity and become the foundation as they grow for introducing new tennis skills. All of these activities can also be building blocks for other ball sports such as soccer and netball to name a couple.
Push on two years later to when they are now 3 1/2 yrs old, they can now understand the difference between a forehand, backhand and volley, whilst gradually building up the consistency of balls being hit over the full size net when thrown the ball and change between shots when commanded.
I’m too old to learn tennis, aren’t I?
No one is too old to learn anything, if you want to play I will help you. A client came to me, he was in his late 80’s (a veteran tennis player who wanted to improve his serve for an upcoming tournament) with 3 lessons I was able to make a small adjustment to improve his consistency and remove some strain without changing his natural swing pattern. Another example I had was a lovely lady in her 60’s who told me ‘Oh I can’t play tennis, but I’m interested in how to play’ after just 1 half hour session she left so impressed she was able to hit the ball over the net and raved about the good time she had doing it!
Here at Ambrose Tennis Academy we offer coaching to all ages and abilities from the littlest of players just starting out to elite players wanting to take tennis to the next level. All our coaching is education based as well as enjoyable and family friendly.
We look forward to seeing you soon!
