Tennis / Das Tennis

Nikolas began his tennis career today at "Kids Club" at the Salzburg Tennis Club. Curiously enough a three year old is too young to play soccer, take a 'gym' class, or enroll in a music class here. However, three-year-olds can take tennis and ice skating. We'll skip the ice skating for now.

Nikolas fell in love with tennis last spring at Pennington Day where he tried 'Tennis on Wheels'. Kids Club seemed just right for Nikolas, tennis for kids from three to seven years old, that is not real tennis, but fun with tennis. Perfect.

I had my first experience of, "Oh my goodness, my child is not placed in the right group!" when we arrived for the first session. There were three groups, and the smallest children (which made up the largest group) were shuffled off to court one. A middle-sized group, equally as large, went off to court two. Left behind were Nikolas and three little boys all a head taller than him. This was to be Herr Mandl's group. Kids Club is part of Mandl's Tennis School, so it was THE Herr Mandl! They had asked if Nikolas had previous tennis experience when we signed him up, and we had explained how we lived across the street from a tennis court and played around for fun, but never really played. I guess since you have to go to a club to have access to a tennis court here, playing around on the court across the street counts for having tennis experience. Off they went to court three.

The other three boys had been in Kids Club before so were running circles (literally) around Nikolas with the first drills of balancing balls on rackets, bouncing balls with the racket, and so on. I looked over at the other groups who were just sort of running around having fun, balls flying every which way, and wondered if there had been a terrible mistake. Why was Nikolas in this group? And then they finally got around to hitting. For those of you who have seen Nikolas on the Pennington tennis courts, you know that he loves Maria Sharapova and is a great mimic of her grunt and backhand. With hitting, Nikolas finally made his mark and led the group. He loved it.

Towards the end, they had a race where they ran back and forth between their tennis racket and balls on the ground, picking up one ball at a time and taking it back to their tennis racket, and repeating over and over again (a great way to trick kids into running suicides!). Nikolas came in second (with the other three tied for first) after misunderstanding the directions and pausing after collecting the first ball:

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