Local NorCal School Brings Tennis to P.E. with the Help of USTA

While Amanda Watson has been a special education teacher since 2011, she recently took on the role of P.E. teacher at North Hills Christian School in Vallejo for first through fifth graders for the first time.

Unsure on where to start, Watson thought back to her memories of P.E. as a kid and what made an impact on her.

“Looking back, I thought about my own experience and my introduction to tennis and how it made me feel connected to sports and made me feel successful as a kid,” Watson remembered. “So, with that in mind, I decided to start the school’s first tennis unit.”

With a plan in place, Watson set out to look for resources to help her develop her curriculum, and that’s when she found USTA’s Net Generation Physical Education Teacher program and decided to sign up.

Once registred for the program, teachers will receive the curriculum and an equipment bag, including a roller equipment bag, red balls, red foam balls, barrier tapes, and chalk to get their tennis program started.

“As the teacher, I need to be able to understand and break down the sport into manageable pieces for the kids to learn the game,” Watson said. “The USTA curriculum is so helpful because it has different lesson plans and activities for different age groups and I can easily differentiate the lessons across my different grade levels and skills.”

Watson is looking forward to the new tennis introduction and plans to integrate the program into her P.E. classes in January 2022.

In the meantime, her students are looking forward to starting their tennis journeys.

“I thought it would be fun to roll out the equipment through the gym one day and take a racquet out to show them, and they all got so excited,” Watson shared.

Based on that positive reaction, Watson decided to share USTA’s resources for P.E. teachers in a teacher’s group on Facebook.

“I really value when other teachers share what they are doing and resources they found that worked, so I wanted to reciprocate,” she said. “Groups like that are my lifeline, so my hope was other teachers could see the resources out there and that you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel.”

Watson could never imagine her post would be so well received. From her one post about USTA’s P.E. resources, 225 new teachers from each USTA section from across the country registered their P.E. or school programs through USTA.

“I think the fact that one post can do that is amazing, and it shows the level of need for resources,” Watson added. “I’m very thankful for groups like this that enable teachers from all over the world to connect together on common ground and that there are organizations like USTA out there that care about the kids in our communities and schools. It’s exciting to see.”

USTA is planning on sending Watson and her students some giveaway swag based on her efforts for spreading the word, and while they’re excited, they are also looking forward to getting the program up and running.

Overall, Watson wants the kids to be able to leave the P.E. program with lifelong fitness and she values tennis as a sport that you can do that no matter your age or skill level.

“I hope that through tennis the kids are going to connect to an active lifestyle and they can see that exercise can be fun,” she said. “The more we can get the kids excited and then get their families involved, then it really goes across the whole community.”