Tennis Industry News

Who said you need tennis courts to run a successful Cardio Tennis program? At the Lowell & Helen Dunigan Family YMCA in Evansville, IN, Tennis Director Siobhan Belloli creates two tennis courts out of the indoor basketball courts during the winter, using pop-up nets and pressureless balls.

Belloli also uses actual tennis courts at the Oak Meadow Golf Club (Dunigan YMCA members have access to the courts at the club), where she runs her tennis academy, and she’ll also use indoor space at a local church. “We run family cardio, kids cardio, cardio for senior citizens,” she says. “We just make it work.”

She has Cardio Tennis classes at least three days a week, and is adding more sessions this spring and summer, including popular family Cardio Tennis sessions. “It’s growing big-time,” Belloli says. “And it’s just a matter of changing up the music” to suit the players.

For older players—the “silver sneakers,” she calls them—she’ll “slow things down a little bit” and play Tony Bennett and Michael Buble songs. For younger kids, she’ll play music from “High School Musical.”

Belloli, who also runs kids’ programming in the QuickStart Tennis format, was the first person at the PTR Symposium to purchase the Cardio Tennis Kids Playbook. (CTK publicly debuted at the PTR Symposium this past February.) “I was one of the people who talked to the TIA about Cardio Tennis Kids as it was developing,” she says. Belloli has been running cardio kids classes for “a very long time,” she adds.

“The Cardio Tennis Kids Playbook is great,” she says. “It’s really good at understanding the different age groups and how far you can push things, and what they’re ready for and not ready for.”

“Cardio Tennis does bring families together, because it’s fun,” says Belloli.