Bremyer Leads Youth Tennis In McPherson

2020 is the 100th anniversary of USTA, and to celebrate, USTA Missouri Valley is recognizing 100 outstanding members of our local tennis communities.

In July, we recognized Janie Bremyer, a tennis community leader in McPherson, Kansas. Bremyer says her tennis career began during the “tennis boom” of the 1970s. As her community was learning to play, she got involved, too.

“That’s how I got started, through these random tennis lessons where huge groups of people would come and learn,” Bremyer said. “I’m the kind of person who has always liked to have a sport, and it just ended up that tennis was a good way to express that.”

The group atmosphere is an element of learning that Bremyer has continued to provide to McPherson’s tennis community through Mac Advantage.

Mac Advantage is a local tennis group that provides lessons, camps and team tennis to the community. The organization partners with schools and parks to provide courts to host lessons and events. Bremyer established Mac Advantage 26 years ago as a way to bring parents and kids together.

“It started as a support group and now it’s more like a racquet club,” Bremyer said. “The year before we started it, I pulled together some of the parents that I knew were tennis enthusiasts and they became a core group. The first couple of years we had around 60 kids involved, and now we’re running around 120 kids.”

Today, Bremyer is still heading the organization and keeps the camps running every summer. She says the best part about being involved in the program is seeing the kids succeed and have fun while doing it.

“It’s really about the relationships you build with the kids. That’s kind of been my thing in life, to provide this for the community,” Bremyer said. “There are people who were there at the start to support this, and their children have grown up, had babies, and now we’re teaching those babies.”

Because of her focus on youth tennis, Bremyer was asked to be involved in USTA’s development of the Youth Progression Pathway- a program designed to help kids develop their skills by using red, orange and green balls, as well as smaller courts.

“We were already doing something like that through MacAdvantage, so I signed up to be one of the 28 groups around the country who were trying the program out,” Bremyer said.