The Cincinnati Tennis Foundation

Performance Tennis: In addition to the 3,375 students we saw at schools and parks, 1,484 players came to CTF led programs at our sites. Players participated in all aspects of the sports pathways including Try Days, team play, tournaments and performance instruction. The estimated total cost is $385k to develop a junior player from ages 5 to 18. We provide hours of free performance training, $301,800 dollars of scholorshipped training, $33,700 of grants and scholarships for tournament travel and $62,500 of equipment. 2024 was a great year for our Performance juniors (called the Excellence Team), and supported players won sevelar state titles, National Gold Balls, and achieved college scholarships.

CTF in the Classroom: Fulfilling our mission to create life champions we support our players with educational oppertunities on and off the court. Each session on court is supported with character building curriculum. Off the court, the lessons synch with literacy curriculum developed by Xavier University educators that incorporates the weekly character theme in to reading and activity assignemnts. Summer camp participants track reading comprehension progress using ReadWorks, math fact improvements with Xtramath and social emotional learning with Hello insight. Summer camp participants showed 5% reading improvements at grade level, 16% improvement with math facts and top scores with social emotional improvements. Compared to an average summer slide loss of 20-30% each year, we are so proud of these results. Over 450 players opted into our educational programs in 2024.

Wheelchair and Adaptive Sports: CTF programmed over 200 hours of play for wheelchair and adaptive athletes in 2024. This includes ongoing instruction for wheelchair tennis, parastanding tennis, adaptive, blind and visually impaired tennis, monthly pickleball programs and seasonal instruction for all athletes. Special events include our Midwest Junior Wheelchair Tennis camp for players across the Midwest and our 6th annual Cincinnati Wheelchair Tennis Open with athletes coming from across the country. Local partnerships include Cincinnati Children's Hospital's be.well program and The Bridge Adapaptive Sports. CTF also helped to support and develop the 2024 NCAA Wheelchair Tennis Finalist and has begun building a parastanding tennis program, for players with disabilities who do not want to play in a wheelchair. Kendra Herber, who helped to launch this program this year, has now earned the title of North American Parastanding Doubles Champion!