Next time you are hiring for a summer program or a holiday camp, the options of this article should ease your hiring anxieties significantly. We will cover three often overlooked categories.
Elementary School Physical Education Teachers
If your summer program includes younger beginning children, think out of the box. Have you ever considered hiring elementary school physical education teachers? Many in your area are looking for summer employment while you are reading this article. They don’t even need any tennis experience. First, go to a local elementary school and ask if you can just observe a physical education class. You’ll probably see a very dedicated and competent teacher organizing dozens of kids at a time performing numerous fun and engaging activities. Most certified tennis teachers would be totally stressed and uncomfortable in that type of environment. Maybe that’s why tennis teachers resort to line drills most of the time. If they have more kids, the lines just get longer. It’s just a question of training.
Elementary school PE teachers, on the other hand, are well-schooled and comfortable engaging large groups of kids and can make the activities fun and effective for each age group and skill level. It is usually much easier to show a PE teacher the basic tennis progressions for beginning juniors, as compared to training tennis pros to become competent group activity coordinators. Definitely have a trained teaching professional head up the groups of beginning juniors, but give him a staff of enthusiastic professionals to work with and let the fun begin!
College Players
For your more advanced juniors, you will need coaches with solid tennis games. College players are always looking for summer employment. No doubt that you need a veteran teaching pro to direct the overall program for your competitive juniors, but try placing a strong college player to execute your drills on each court. This is a much more sensible option to hiring good teaching pros just for summer employment. Generally speaking, the better teaching professionals already have year-round commitments, so your part-timers are the less experienced ones anyway. Note that I am not recommending that you underpay your college players, but generally you can expect to compensate them less than fulltime teaching professionals. If you want to check competitive pay scales just call some of the larger academies across the country and inquire what they pay college players who help them out in their summer programs. You’ll find out that you can offer the college players more than the academies and they will be still be pleased with a modest hourly rate.
Engage Your Own Juniors
A few programs in the U.S. have figured out how to design and schedule their junior programs to capitalize the powerful motivational force of kids helping other kids. Here’s how it works. Most summer programs group the juniors by playing levels and ages. In the scenario we are recommending, have the oldest and strongest children be scheduled to play in the first time slot. The next oldest should be scheduled next and it goes on and on until the very youngest children are scheduled to play last. Then, have the best kids in each program stay for 30 minutes and help with the next younger program. Set it up so the kids who are asked to stay are looked up to for their qualities of reliability, maturity, helpfulness, and overall ability. They become the “assistant pros” for the next younger group. This benefits them in that they get more court time and contact with your professional staff. Plus, they will enjoy being looked up to by their slightly younger peers. The next younger group benefits because they look up to the next older group and will be inspired to perform well just by being around them. This natural mentor program is one of the most powerful yet underused tools available.
Consider any one of these resources or use all three to create new levels of success in your junior program. Remember that if you make your programs fun and build the self-esteem of each participant in the process, you are almost guaranteed to succeed.
– i.e. PE teachers for little children and summer programs. For advanced junior programs, tapping into local college players.