KEEPING FIT : Promising Young Tennis Player Puts Skills in Play Off the Court

When Mara Colaizzi first picked up a tennis racket four years ago, she discovered two things right away.

“I was terrible at it,” she says. “But it was so fun.”

The fun part helped her get past the terrible part, and now, thanks to the support and encouragement of her family and tennis instructors, the 14-year-old Newport Beach resident is ranked ninth in Southern California in her age group.

“I’m going to be in the top 10 in the world someday,” she says.

Going to be, or want to be?

“Going to be,” she insists.

When she’s not traveling to national tournaments, Mara spends four hours a day, officially, working toward that goal, under the supervision of Sam Olson, director of junior tennis at the Balboa Bay Club Racquet Club in Newport Beach. Unofficially, she adds another hour and a half practicing at home with the aid of a ball machine. And that doesn’t include the time she spends working on maintaining a winning attitude by visualizing hypothetical matches, watching herself on videotape or keeping a chart of all the food she eats.

There are other youths in Orange County who could enjoy the game, even excel at it. But unlike Mara, they don’t have access to a club, a ball machine, maybe not even a racquet. And the Balboa Bay Club Racquet Club is devoting all its facilities this week to a junior tennis tournament aimed at making the game accessible to them as well.

Even before it began on Monday, the tournament, a first for the club, had already raised more than $20,000 in cash, plus underwriting, says Karen Nixon, the club’s director of tennis. The proceeds will go to the Pacific Southwest Youth Tennis Foundation, a nonprofit organization set up by the Southern California Tennis Assn.

Nixon says the money will be used to support two programs for less-privileged Orange County children. The first program will establish grants through the SCTA’s National Junior Tennis League program to set up sites in Santa Ana and Garden Grove. The program, established by tennis star Arthur Ashe, offers lessons, court access, and even racquets and balls to minority and low-income children ages 8 to 18.

The young players who show the most promise from that program will receive grants to participate in the Balboa Bay Club’s junior tennis program.

The second program, Nixon says, will establish collegiate tennis scholarships for young tennis players who need financial assistance.

The tournament and the two programs are part of the Balboa Bay Club’s new emphasis on junior tennis. A year ago, the club’s junior program had 15 participants; now that number has jumped to 250.

“We decided we wanted to make something happen here,” Nixon says. Several clubs in Florida have also made junior tennis a priority, and have champion players to show for it.

Already, the Balboa Bay Club has 15 junior players, including Mara, participating in national tournaments this year. With two promising young players from other parts of the country moving to Orange County so they can train at the club, Olson says, “we’ll have five of the top 20 kids in the nation in boys 12 and under.”

Olson says it’s important for talented players to find challenging opponents.

“A lot of times, it’s hard for a kid to develop unless they find a high level of play,” he says. “We want to give kids an opportunity to become great players.”

He says he prefers working with young players because “they have no bad habits to unlearn. And you get to be with them a long time and see them grow.”

“It’s been a sacrifice for a lot of our members to give kids this much court time,” Nixon says. “But this is important to us. They’re the future of tennis.”

Mara’s daily routine begins with a two-hour workout in the morning, half of that spent running at the Newport Harbor High School track or the beach. Then she works with the ball machine at home in the afternoon, and returns to the club in the evening to play more tennis.

In her spare time, “my mom and Sam work with me to help me keep my calm on the court,” she says. In one exercise, she visualized and described a match between herself and her toughest opponent. “I wrote out every single point,” she says, “It was like I was a radio announcer or something.”

Mara smiles when she reveals the score: “I won, 6-0, 6-0.”

Through videotapes, she learned that she wasn’t moving around the court nearly as much as she thought she was. “Her feet hardly moved at all,” Olson says. “And when she saw it on the tape, she started changing.”

Nixon, who played in tournaments herself as a teen-ager, says the game teaches young people lessons that can help them in other aspects of life.

“You learn how to deal with defeats off the court, not just on,” she says. “And you appreciate your body more too. You learn to treat it better. It helps kids get into a healthy lifestyle.”

The tournament continues through Sunday.