We breathe, sleep and eat tennis... literally. This morning Liam looked up from his bowl of grits and announced, "Look -- it's a tennis court!" The white space in the middle is the court (Daddy added the net). The round heap surrounding it is where the fans sit. At the base of each court are "the locker rooms." Picture an aerial view of Center Court at Wimbledon, and you've got it.Since he was old enough to throw things (somewhere around 14 months?), if it had a ball and something to hit it with, Liam was all over it. Baseball, tennis, golf... we could have started him on any of it, and he would have gone like a fish to water. One of the boys' favorite activities this summer has been to play in the driveway with ping pong paddles and a tennis ball (well, a tennis ball each). Damian would sometimes take Liam into the street to hit the ball back and forth with the paddles. The little basketball goal got plenty of use, too; but rather than just throwing the ball, Liam wants to hit it.
We have been feeling the effects of being cooped up in a town home with no yard, and we were searching for something and somewhere that would let us take these boys out of the house and wear them out. Weekend walks at Furman, with Liam riding his bike alongside, were just not cutting it. By the time we had finished streaming two weeks of live Wimbledon on the computer at breakfast and lunchtime, during which time the boys spent nearly every waking moment using their lovey-blankets as "racquets" to hit wadded up kleenex "balls," it was obvious what we needed to do. So we set out to find some tennis courts.
We ended up with a five-day free trial of a local sports club. The indoor saline pool was a big hit. Both boys quickly overcame their distrust of the water, each in their different ways, and came to the final conclusion that they were having a blast. But where they most want to be is on a court. Yesterday Parker said to me in his irresistible little whine, "Can we play tennis on a court with a racquet and a ball?"
I took Liam to a Tiny Tots tennis program last Thursday. There was only one other girl there, and Liam jumped right in. We had to borrow a racquet from the teacher, and it was too big for him, but he was game to try. He only got about 20 minutes of hitting time, and it nowhere near filled up his sports tank. On Saturday we started our day by watching Damian test out the tennis social at the sports club. The boys spent that hour in the nearby grass with their ping pong paddles. Then we took Liam to see an elite tennis coach in the area who was willing to take a look at him for free. We were thinking that it was totally overkill to set a four-year-old up with an expensive coach, but at least we would get some ideas about how to get Liam into the game.
Well, Liam ate it up. Warwick Bashford spent about half an hour with him, taking him through various exercises that gave him an idea of Liam's potential. With a real racquet in his hand for only the second time (and the first that was the right size), Liam was eliciting comments like, "He's a fast learner... He's not your typical four-year-old... It's nice to see a kid with some real talent for a change." The bottom line: If we want him to teach our son, this coach who helped Michael Chang prepare for Roland Garros at the French Open is willing to take Liam on.
I would love to let him coach Liam. I don't care what Liam does or does not do with his tennis, but this guy, as we later discussed with Liam, has "teaching smarts." He is out to teach a discipline in such a way that the learning process is more valuable than the acquisition of the actual skills. He would be for Liam what my violin teacher was for me: a valuable craftsmaster and authority figure outside the home sphere. This is doubly important when you intend to home school.
For me, this marks a rite of passage for Liam. He is no longer a little preschooler. He's ready to move on to a bigger, older way of learning. The way he interacts with Warwick is so eager and unaffected, so sponge-like. You might think it's just as silly as we did to start a four-year-old in private tennis lessons, but whether we commit to them or not, he is ready for them.
At the end of their time together, Liam asked Warwick, "So do you want to do that [exercise] again, or do you want to do something else?" A half hour does not come anywhere close to exhausting his interest. I have yet to determine at what point Liam actually gets tired of hitting the ball around, but it is well past two hours.
I have taken the boys a couple of times to the courts myself. Give Parker a racquet and his own ball, and you can pretty much check in with him a couple of hours later. What he does with them looks a little more like golf than tennis, but he is happy as a clam to have a whole tennis court to roam around in... especially if the court is right next to the trees, where he can find a few stray fallen leaves to poke around in and some bugs to examine. And Liam... Last time as we were leaving, a woman in the next court over commented to me, "You're starting him young, huh?" I replied, "I can't stop him!" We don't have time to stay long enough to really tire him, but as Warwick pointed out, it's good to make him walk away still hungry for more.
Liam said something to Damian when I was out for a rare moment alone the other day. Unfortunately, the exact syntax is lost in a paternal shuffle of dishes and storytelling and bed-putting, but Liam essentially said that he is just not happy unless he is playing tennis. Parker now replaces his usual "my name is John Piper" with the simple statement, "I'm Federer." (He pronounces this "Fedder.") Both boys mope around all day until I say we can get in the car and go to the courts.
I'm hoping this is just a stage, because the whole cooped-up-in-a-town-home thing is much worse than it was when we first diagnosed the problem. We basically have 2.5 hours of contentment on the court, with about 9.5 hours of disgruntled whining the rest of the day. Part of this may be sheer fatigue. We go out into the hot sun and run around for a long while every afternoon. You would think this would make them sleep like babes, but no! I think they are both too excited; it takes Liam a good two hours past his bedtime to fall asleep lately.
This morning I bought everyone a little while of quiet happiness by suggesting that Liam take all his LEGOs and build me the biggest thing he has ever built. He whined about this at first, but then he got into the idea of building a house. It turned into something more like a country club. There is a parking garage right next to the tennis court, "in case they want to go home and come back again." The locker rooms are way over to the right, up those stairs. And if the court looks a little crowded, it's because the blue and red squares are "boxes of balls," and the yellow ones are racquets.
One racquet is for Federer, and one is for Nadal.
0 comments:
Post a Comment