Dear Editor:
RE: Club is inclusive, June 20.
Different strokes for different folks. Any parent should be commended for getting her family on the tennis court. We need more of it.
Still membership personifies a type of inclusiveness. Also, lessons can predispose the sort of interface one has in tennis. Approaches that are prescriptive tend to dis-enable other firing and wiring capacities in the brain. It’s this spontaneous stuff the aging brain needs.
Tennis is a fluid game. If you trip over your feet you realize foot placement is a strategy you need to work on. If you hit it over the fence you need to change the arc of your trajectory. Learning can mean constantly modifying your stroke and the angle of your racquet, etc. Growth is often spontaneous.
This is different than lessons. A person, taking lessons, learning the schemata of a backhand or topspin is predisposed to a style of thinking that curbs intuitive interface.
The property for the tennis courts is municipal property. Kids should grow up in this community knowing they can go hit some tennis balls without a steeple chase of challenges, just to get on the court.
All I’m saying is: the municipality deserves a piece of the tennis pie. That piece, I believe, is open access to the sports complex courts. If there is a professional court in private hands, of course they get to call the shots. This is different. This is public money and public ownership.
One quarter of residents in Ontario are below the poverty line. They can’t afford lessons.
To access tennis courts I have belonged to many clubs. It is necessary and prerequisite. Without membership there is no access.
Alternatively, two kids on hot summer day might wander into a second-hand store and buy a couple racquets. One of those kids in growing “naturally” with the game, might someday be champion.
A few years ago the tennis pro (back then), was much enamoured with Andy Roddick’s serve. Andy Roddick’s serve was the Bible. The logistics of tennis depend on who’s doing the talking. Like in reality, one generation of ideas is displaced by the next.
Fergus can cut the baby in half, because there are two locations, without spilling any blood.
Give unto the tennis club that which is the tennis club. Give onto the municipality of Fergus that which is the municipality’s.
It works, I suspect, in everyone’s favour to host a tennis club that oversees its own program. That is, everyone’s favour except those who can’t access a court!
To lock the gates in a 10-year package is not a good bargain.
David Courtney,
Belwood