Sportsmen’s Tennis and Enrichment Center (STEC) is widely known as a tennis club, but it’s also a place where children learn much more than how to serve, volley, and lob the ball. It’s a space where they can gain academic skills and lessons about life that will take them well beyond the familiar playing courts.

On April 10, STEC celebrated the opening of its newly expanded classroom space, completed as a part of phase one of the facility’s capital campaign. The additional classrooms will allow the club to serve more students and enhance its educational support system. 

“Sportsmen’s was started as a tennis club, but it didn’t take us too long to figure out that the young people coming to our community tennis programs not only needed tennis, but they also needed educational enrichment,” said STEC Board of Directors Co-Chair Marilyn Chase.

“So, we expanded our tennis programming to include educational enrichment. Then we began to focus, to some extent exclusively, on educational improvement for some of our youngest students.”

The two new bright and white-walled classrooms are furnished with desks, colorful carpets, and reading nooks.

“Our young people spend so much time in classrooms, sort of in-rope learning,” Chase said. “It’s important to us to provide various kinds of opportunities for young people to learn in this space. We want them to develop a lifelong love of learning and to want to continue to be engaged in the process of learning.”

In the classroom, the students learn how to make healthy meals, write short stories, and even hold mock court trials. 

Charlynne Mines-Smart, STEC’s chief operating officer, added: “These are the fun things that we get to do in the programs, but it’s important work that is connected to the fun things. We are having our students walk away feeling more confident in themselves and in their ability to learn and to grow in the community.” 

In each of these activities, the children and teens gain math, science, and reading skills. One goal of the club is to have each participant leave STEC with a reading level higher than it was at the beginning of the academic year.  

It isn’t just the staff who care about literacy skills; longtime club members do, too. 

“Pre-Covid, I wanted to help kids read, so I would come here one afternoon a week,” said Ray Green, who first joined STEC over 20 years ago. “I think they were maybe fourth graders and third graders, and we would sit around and read and work on vocabulary. It was quite a challenge. I didn’t realize how difficult it is to teach kids. But I think we made progress, and that was fun.”

At the celebration, the reading nook, now called the “Reading With Mr. Ray Corner,” was dedicated to Green.

“People could have just said, ‘It’s good enough to have the kids on the court and doing some academic stuff,’” said Carl Thompson, chief of STEC’s external relation. “ ‘It’s good enough for this place just to be a tennis place.’ There could have been a lot of energy around ‘it’s good enough.’”