New Call: Tennis, Everyone!

The weathered courts atop the condominium parking garage in Santa Ana are an unlikely place to secure the future of U.S. tennis. The nets were destroyed by vandals years ago. The chipped, sloping asphalt courts send balls in all the wrong directions.

But the wide-eyed youngsters who whack the balls over makeshift peewee nets are unfazed. Their wild, choppy strokes would make tennis purists wince, but their determination and enjoyment bring smiles. Never mind that they’re wearing football jerseys and tattered jeans; a 12-year-old with a smooth backhand is the only one with pressed shorts and a polo shirt.

This predominantly Latino city of about 350,000, where more than half of the residents are foreign-born and soccer is the favorite sport, is the newest target in the tennis industry’s ambitious initiative to nourish its ranks with minority players.

If tennis doesn’t expand significantly beyond white suburbia, the game’s deep thinkers believe, Latino athletes will continue to eschew the sport. And if expanding the pool of tennis players means going toe to toe with soccer, so be it.

The median age in Santa Ana is 26, and attracting Latino youngsters to tennis will pay off for years, sports marketers know, because teenage loyalty to a sport carries into adulthood.

Santa Ana was chosen as a test bed in the push for Latino players for the very reason that so few people play the sport there.

“For us, tennis is still a rich man’s sport,” said Luis Rodriguez, tennis coach at Santa Ana High School and one of the few local sons to have played collegiate tennis in the last two decades.

Athletes here tend to embrace soccer and baseball, and to deride tennis as feminine, white and elitist.

Rodriguez struggles each year to field boys’ teams. This year, he persuaded 40 students to try out. Most of them had never wielded a racket. About 100 freshmen tried out for the boys’ soccer program, and the wrestling program has more than 100 kids.

“I recruited my tail off this year,” said Rodriguez, who struggled to enlist 19 players the previous year. “I went to all the other sports this year and said, ‘Anybody you don’t want, I’ll take.’ ”

And so the U.S. Tennis Assn. was heartened by the rooftop scene the other night, as youngsters darted across the chipped asphalt. “We don’t want to take people away from soccer, but soccer is a team sport,” said Ronita Elder, whose job with the Southern California Tennis Assn. is to attract players from various cultural backgrounds. “Tennis is an individual sport and a very social sport that can be played by the whole family. We want people to continue to play baseball and soccer, but let’s use the whole park.”

The stakes are high for the tennis industry, which is struggling to retain its popularity.

“Our growth has been flat since 2000, and that’s not good,” said D.A. Abrams, the USTA’s multicultural coordinator. “The more folks you have playing the sport of tennis, the better it is for everybody -- ball and tennis racket manufacturers, tennis instructors. And the more participants you have, the more potential fans you have on television and at live matches.”

The New York-based USTA estimates that 23 million Americans play tennis, and it wants 30% more by 2010. But the industry realizes that that probably won’t happen unless it begins to recruit those ethnicities that traditionally haven’t embraced tennis.

The number of soccer players has grown 14% since 1987 and the sport now boasts almost 18 million participants, said Jim Moorhouse, spokesman for the U.S. Soccer Federation.

David Carter, a Los Angeles-based sports marketing consultant, applauded the USTA’s efforts in Santa Ana and other communities with large minority populations, saying sports industries are beginning to understand that they need to nurture the next generation of fans.

“Tennis understands that it needs to be more inclusive and appeal to people from all walks of life, not just white America,” he said. “These kinds of outreach programs are a great way to recruit new groups of fans.”

But Carter said such outreach is far from a sure thing.

“Soccer has a great outreach program,” he said. “Participation is high. But not everybody playing becomes a longtime fan of the sport. We’ve been saying soccer is going to be the next big sport for more than a decade. But it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe the next generation.”

In Santa Ana, the push for Latino players began last fall in low-key fashion with focus groups, where prospective players told USTA interviewers they had had little exposure to tennis.

So the USTA began putting on demonstrations and clinics at parks and elementary schools. Last month, a street in Santa Ana’s downtown Artists Village was transformed into a series of courts where more than 200 city officials and families smacked foam balls and real balls over makeshift nets.

Santa Ana Councilman Mike Garcia said the sport made a good first impression that night, especially with his nephews.

“I’ve tried like crazy to get them interested in team sports, but they’ve never wanted any part of it,” he said. “But tennis, for some reason, really excited them. Maybe because it was new.”

Some tennis promoters worry that interest among some newcomers may wane, so the sport’s long-term health benefits are being pitched to the new audience.

“We’re telling seniors they can walk around on the court and play to build bone mass and improve their heart rate,” said Elder, whose regional organization has partnered with Latino Health, a community organization, to promote tennis as a way to combat obesity and diabetes.

“We’re telling soccer players they can use tennis as a great cross-training tool,” she said. “Mental health organizations can take their clients out for exercise to relieve stress and depression. I’m just trying to tell people they don’t have to run around like Venus and Serena Williams to use the tennis courts.”

That get-healthy message hit home with 35-year-old Elizabeth Lopez, who found herself smitten after trying her hand at tennis for the first time on the rooftop courts of the Town Square Condominiums.”I played baseball and basketball in school, but I’ve haven’t done much lately,” she said. “I’d like to be able to come down here in the afternoons for some exercise, so I can lose some weight.”

Neil Machander, 73, who coached tennis at Santa Ana High School for 40 years, said tennis lost its local footing about 15 years ago when the school district dropped the sport in intermediate schools.

“That’s exactly the age when you need to pick them up,” said Machander, who led the Santa Ana High boys to 12 league titles in the 1940s and 1950s. “Kids get hooked on sports when they’re 11, 12 and 13. We’re losing kids to all the other sports.”

The city offers tennis to some fourth- and fifth-graders through the school district, and the USTA offers 24 hours of youth instruction over six weeks for $7 in the spring and $10 in the summer, when most youngsters are playing soccer or baseball.

If Santa Ana youngsters aren’t coaxed into picking up a racket until high school, they are years behind their competition in fundamentals.

Rodriguez, Santa Ana High’s coach the last four years, said he must start from scratch with his players.

“Tennis is such a technical sport,” he said. “You need some structure and some decent instruction. If kids don’t get that, they’ll reach a certain plateau and just quit.”

Many Latinos who play high school tennis say they do so with little encouragement from peers.

“In our community, tennis is considered a feminine sport,” said Juan Carlos Garcia, 16, a doubles player on the Santa Ana High boys’ team. “But everybody who says that has never tried it.”

Carter, the sports consultant, notes that, at its highest levels, tennis crosses cultural lines.

“With the Williams sisters and all these foreign stars from Spain and everywhere else, it’s the face of the United Nations,” he said. “It really is a sport that reaches everybody. I don’t think it’s about ethnicity, it’s about class. Tennis, like golf, is not an inexpensive sport.”

Rodriguez said his players figure that out pretty quickly.

“You can buy a racket ... for $30, but a decent racket costs about $150,” Rodriguez said. “Equipment is so important in tennis. You don’t want to start out your match with a handicap.”

The USTA hopes to promote tennis as a more populist sport, and says it will begin advertising this summer in nontraditional tennis outlets such as Vibe magazine, which covers hip-hop culture, and on Latino TV stations.

“We’re trying to change the perception,” said Abrams, the USTA multicultural coordinator. “Part of showing that tennis is for everyone is using images of everyone. We’re trying to leave nobody behind.”

To that end, the USTA says achieving multicultural participation is as important to the industry as staging the U.S. Open tournament in Flushing Meadows, N.Y., developing elite professionals and expanding community tennis.

Some of the game’s biggest stars have been African American (Arthur Ashe, Althea Gibson and the Williams sisters) and Latino (Pancho Gonzalez). But the USTA has never before courted African Americans and Latinos with such a grass-roots effort.

The industry’s focus changed in 2002 when the USTA learned in a survey that one in three tennis newcomers was African American or Latino.

“And we did that without a whole bunch of marketing,” Abrams said.

“If we can hone our skills, reach out to market areas where we haven’t been before while keeping our eye on the sweet spot, white America, I think we can reach our goals.”

Last year, the USTA poured $100,000 into inner-city marketing in Santa Ana, Kansas City, Mo., and Columbus, Ohio.

Newcomers to the Santa Ana High School tennis program will find a small but increasingly talented squad of players dedicated to the game.

“My guys spend eight to nine hours on weekends playing tennis,” Rodriguez said. “They know they have to because they’re already so far behind everyone else.”