Mia Foote has strong imprint on the Jackson tennis scene

Mia Foote is giving back to the sport that gave her purpose.

Foote got involved in tennis after an ACL injury ended her pursuit of her first two loves, volleyball and basketball. She especially loved basketball, but the jumping required to excel in that sport wasn’t there after her recovery.

Her sister played tennis and spoke highly of it, so Foote gave it a shot. She picked it up as a sophomore at Jackson High School in southeastern Missouri near Cape Girardeau and excelled quickly. In fact, her first competitive match came on the varsity team when four varsity players missed the match because of illness.

Jackson lost that match, 8-1, but the one victory was Foote’s.

“I made the game go on forever,” Foote said. “The final score was 8-6. Everybody else was just sitting there in the dark watching me play the last match on the courts. But I won.”

That is a great example of Foote’s competitiveness, something that is stroked with tennis.

“That is the one thing that I absolutely love about tennis,” she said. “There’s no one else to blame it on. You’re the only one out there on the court. The game goes how you play it. Every sport I played before was a team sport, but tennis was mentally challenging because it’s all you.”

After she graduated from Jackson in 2022, she and a friend started organizing tennis clinics for young people. The summer clinics returned this year, with Foote hosting four weeklong camps for boys and girls 8 to 18 years old. The camps take place at Jackson City Park during weeknights.

Foote said the majority of participants in attendance are between 9 and 12. She teaches basic skills and rules to better prepare the kids for future competitions.

“Being a big school in Jackson, it’s tough because we always end up playing and competing against St. Louis teams,” she said. “There are more than 800 courts in that city and plenty of opportunities and pro players to take lessons from. We don’t really have a chance.

“It would just be nice to see that level of competitiveness stepped up. To do that, we need to introduce it earlier like those bigger schools do.”