|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Related Pages: >About >Our Staff >Become a Coach >Press Coverage >Awards
About Our Company
Mission, history, management, and where we're headed
Our Mission 
Tennis has come a sport of the elite, often limited the country-club crowd who can afford to pay $70/hr for a private lessons. We seek to bring the game to a wider audience through far more affordable rates (think less than 1/2 the price) and multiple locations. To this end, we provide vouchers for low-income aspiring tennis players to take private lessons for $10/hr. For our younger students, we believe that character development is even more important than skill improvement. Tennis is a great sport because it fosters physical, social, and intellectual development all at once. But tennis is also an ideal vehicle for indirect learning: while a coach may be discussing the mechanics of a stroke, the student is really learning about self-motivation, positive thinking, and respect. Most importantly, we place a significant emphasis on the peer-to-peer educational model. Our coaches can relate to their students and understand how to motivate them and how students learn best. At the same time, our coaches our role models; we require that our coaches have a 3.5 GPA and play on their school's varsity team. Our Story 
Eric Knudson and Jim Liu founded Serve It Up Tennis, LLC. as high school freshmen in 2004. We both attended the International Baccalaureate program at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, MD and played on the varsity team together. Previously, we had taught tennis at a local club and found that there weren't many options for tennis instruction except for expensive private clubs.So, we began to teach independently and had such enthusiastic feedback that we decided to strike out on our own. After being certified by the United States Professional Tennis Association, we set up our website, hired several teammates, and we were off! As Eric and Jim now study at Stanford and Yale, they brought on Carson McCallum as a partner to be Regional Director in the Washington, DC area. Our Business Philosophy
Our company is only as good as our coaches, so we topgraded and hired the best young tennis players out there. While we originally faced some skepticism as a company run by high school kids, we've found that being a young entrepreneur is actually a huge advantage. True, it was tough to juggle homework, extracurriculars, and a business in high school. But we could afford to take huge risks because, well, we didn't have much to lose. We we're very lucky to have very supportive families that we could always fall back upon. We could afford to take very low salaries and reinvest 80% of our profits in the business, which has paid dividends in terms of company growth. We believe in the triple-bottom line: financial stability, environmental sustainability, and social responsibility. We believe that an entrepreneur should make fiscally viable decisions that aim to help the community and promote environmentally-friendly business operations. Our Future
We're now in the process of expanding to the San Francisco area. We are also hoping to work with the public school system to provide free instruction at elementary school PE programs, particularly those in poorer areas. We also hope to institute a program through which our coaches will offer discounted lessons for handicapped players. At the same time as the business expands, Eric and Jim are giving a larger role to a younger team of motivated students as we move on to other things. Jim is considering a Computer Science or Economics major at Yale and hopes to get into social entrepreneurship and the non-profit world. Eric is looking to focus on Public Policy or Political Science at Stanford and is looking forward to getting involved in a tech start-up and California politics. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||