Beyond the Baseline: NYJTL and The Cary Leeds Center for Tennis & Learning

When New York Junior Tennis & Learning (NYJTL) was founded more than 50 years ago, the brainchild of Arthur Ashe and Skip Hartman, two pillars of the New York City tennis community, the goal was simple: develop the character of young people through tennis and education for a lifetime of success on and off the court.

Since its inception in 1971, NYJTL has been doing just that, using  the sport of tennis as a vehicle for positive change in the lives of countless children across New York City. Many of these kids would have otherwise not been introduced to tennis.

“We reach communities that don’t have access to tennis, and that includes communities that don’t have any tennis courts. So for example, we are putting courts into schools where they have room in their gyms, cafeterias and schoolyards,” said NYJTL CEO Udai Tambar. “And that includes parks as well. Step one is to introduce tennis to these kids, and that’s the hook. If you can get people in, you can then engage with them through tennis. Once you have that, you can start doing other things.”

NYJTL has a full reach across the five boroughs of New York City, and is the largest youth tennis and education nonprofit in the country, serving nearly 90,000 kids annually. This comes at no cost to participants, and includes an array of programming that goes far beyond just teaching tennis. Some of the options incorporated are school-based afterschool programs, free grassroots tennis in parks, schoolyards and partner sites, training programs for physical education teachers, and high-performance tennis programs at NYJTL’s Cary Leeds Center for Tennis & Learning.

The ethos of the entire organization is that tennis and education are catalysts for long-term achievement, and that is what continues to keep the staff there motivated.

“Tennis has opened so many doors for me, and it’s really come full circle for me to be able to be at an organization like NYJTL, and be able to help the next generation of players, and expose them to all the things that tennis has done for me,” Ahsha Rolle, who currently serves as the Executive Director of Tennis at NYJTL’s Cary Leeds Center for Tennis & Learning. “It’s been great. In addition to the coaching I do on court, I also train the coaches organization-wide, and being able to train hundreds of different coaches has been extremely rewarding.”

Located in the South Bronx, specifically Crotona Park, NYJTL’s Cary Leeds Center for Tennis & Learning (CLC) is the flagship home of the NYJTL. It opened more than a decade ago in 2015, and offers both commercial and free community programs for juniors and adults, and serves as a multi-community hub. It is located in one of the nation’s poorest congressional districts, and in a borough that has the lowest graduation rate in New York City, but it is home for so many of the young people that walk through its doors.

“We have a really positive mission of empowering children through tennis and education, and knowing that every day you’ve got kids in the community who have this beacon in their neighborhood to be able to play tennis and basically have this opportunity to be exposed to this great sport,” said NYJTL’s CLC General Manager Steve O’Keefe. “Tennis is a unique sport in that you only need one other person, or even a wall, to get started. So to expose kids to a sport that they can play their entire life teaches so many life skills, and also helps them meet people they would never have met in their life without tennis.”

Jeremy Victoria is one of the many success stories to come out of NYJTL and specifically NYJTL’s Cary Leeds Center. A native of the Bronx, Victoria began playing in their ACES Afterschool Program, which offers a comprehensive, free educational experience to students including providing STEM instruction, literacy activities, tennis training, tutoring, wellness, nutrition and social-emotional learning.

As he got older, he was selected to join its Scholar Athlete Program which provides its participants with in-depth tennis and education instruction as well as college preparedness and will create the pathway to college that we believe can change the life trajectory for many NYC youth.

“It’s always been a home for me.,” said Victoria, who now plays at Fordham University. “I’ve never taken it for granted. Sometimes I would go there just to study, or if I didn’t want to go home to my house. It’s a second resort and for a lot of people it’s a first resort. If you wanted to chill out after school, you could. We’ve been so fortunate to have this right here in the Bronx, because Crotona Park was known for a lot of gang activity and didn’t have a great reputation. I think about all the things that have happened in my life, and a lot of bad situations or mishaps that have happened, and what could have been had it not been for the Cary Leeds Center.”

NYJTL’s Cary Leeds Center for Tennis & Learning is the home of high-performance tennis for the larger NYJTL umbrella. Last year, it was named an official USTA Coaching Education Center as part of USTA’s strategy to increase the number of Americans playing tennis to 35 million by 2035, positioning CLC as a national center for coaching excellence and player development. And while the high-performance nature of tennis is important, and CLC continues to provide top-end coaching and produce top-end talent, it’s just one of the many offerings of NYJTL. The Cary Leeds Center was named as a coaching hub by the USTA in 2025, but NYJTL was also designated as one of 10 Community Impact Hubs nationwide, and the only CIH in the Northeast, and awarded $450,000 by the USTA Foundation to support its efforts to reach nearly 300,000 new young people and families by the end of 2027.

“Through this initiative, NYJTL will bring its programming to new schools and expand offerings at existing school sites throughout the city. It will also provide professional development training to more New York City public school physical education teachers, enabling them to teach the sport during their classes,” said Tambar. “Family engagement will be a key focus with regular events at after-school programs and grassroots tennis sites so that parents, siblings and guardians can get on the court together. To ensure we have the people to deliver these programs, we will train dozens of new coaches–including afterschool staff and grassroots program instructors–in a ‘mentorship first’ approach that supports youth development in the coming months.”

For the last 50 years, NYJTL has been at the forefront of providing invaluable community resources throughout the city, with tennis being the nucleus of all of that work. From beginner tennis through high-performance training, there is hardly any aspect of the tennis industry that the organization is not involved with, and it uses tennis to bridge the gaps that often exist in communities.

Examples of this are plenty, and include the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD) Saturday Night Lights program, where middle-school and high-school aged youth from the Bronx come to CLC to play tennis, eat pizza and bond with NYPD officers. CLC also offers free tennis programming for the children of those who live in Samaritan Daytop Village, two transitional living facilities for families in the Bronx, which helps ease the pain felt by these families, even for just an hour on the tennis court.

It’s been a half-century of community involvement and community engagement for NYJTL, and as the Cary Leeds Center’s reach continues to expand, and more and more kids are able to grow through the sport of tennis, it remains a shining example of the power that tennis can have to lift up and create thriving communities.