Executive Director Jenny Schnitzer to retire at the end of 2025

Of course, even though the Eastern role seemed like a perfect fit, she didn’t get much—or any—time to acclimate.

“My first week on the job, I had a volunteer call me,” she recalled. “And he just yelled at me for 20 minutes about how upset he was, how he sent in a volunteer form and nobody ever called him back. I finally said, ‘OK, just give me one thing that I can do right. Let’s work on one project together.’ From that conversation, we became best friends.”

Schnitzer headed down to the volunteer’s little town of White Meadow Lake, New Jersey, and together they grew a community park program from 20 to 100 participants. 

“To watch somebody take a small program, reach out to the entire area and build it up like that...I just saw the big picture,” she said. “We could do this across the entire section, and that really became the goal.”

Over the years, she collaborated closely with community tennis associations and recruited a large number of volunteers to help provide additional programming. Some of those volunteers would go on to do so much for the section in the ensuing years that they later won national awards for their endeavors; some were even inducted into the Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame. One, club owner Ari Roberts, is currently serving as USTA Eastern’s president.

“My club MatchPoint Tennis opened in December 2010 in Goshen, and about a year later Jenny visited to sell me on everything USTA had to offer,” he said of their first meeting. “She asked how USTA Eastern could help me and I started throwing out ideas, and Jenny’s attitude of ‘try and see what happens’ is a big reason why MatchPoint is successful today. I’ve come to realize my story is very similar to many others. You go to a conference with Jenny and it’s like walking around with the mayor! She genuinely cares. Her ‘let’s figure it out together’ mindset is the reason so many great tennis organizations are flourishing across the section.”

In 2022, we interviewed Janet Lefkowitz, the cofounder of Help Expand Recreation Opportunities, or HERO, Inc., an organization that, for more than 30 years, has worked to develop local adaptive tennis initiatives for those with special needs.

“HERO never would've survived without Eastern and [its charitable wing] Junior Tennis Foundation, and more importantly, Jenny Schnitzer,” Lefkowitz said. “She is just sensational, as you probably know. She understands the need for this. She's always been there to help us with money and with support and equipment.”

And just last year we spoke with Sandy Hoffman, who organized local tennis programming throughout the 1980s and 1990s before joining USTA Eastern as a staffer herself.

“I met Jenny early into her time at Eastern, and she’s always been terrific,” Hoffman said. “What made my job so wonderful was Jenny, because I would go in for a meeting and she would say ‘Yeah, we can do that.’ She would just let me fly, and that was great.”

Even though she is stepping down from the role, Schnitzer’s own approach to growing the game will no doubt loom large and influence the organization and the greater Eastern tennis community well into 2026 and beyond. After all, so many members of this community can also claim that they too have “learned from the best”.

“It’s about relationships,” Schnitzer said. “We cannot do it alone from the section office. It’s the relationships we form locally that make a big difference. The local volunteers, the local club owner, the local park person. Without them, we couldn’t do what we do to grow tennis. It’s about their work. They are the boots on the ground. We’re here to support them—with training, with guidance, with grants. And friendship.”

Thank you, Jenny, for 33 years of service to the Eastern tennis community!