Chris Marshall here, the founder of Young Champs and friend of Matt (Smith) taking over the blog for the latest edition of the MTWT blog! Sometime last summer I was telling Matt about us going to Zimbabwe for a holiday and our links with Harare through a close friend of ours called Leroy. Leroy went to University with my wife (and business partner) Catherine Dibble and has recently moved back to Harare.
One thing led to another and we thought it would be amazing to take the MTWT to Southern Africa and do an event. So fast forward to August 16th 2024 and were boarding a plane with 60kgs worth of rackets, balls, t-shirts and nets all donated by clients of our coaching business G Tennis (based in Lambeth, SW London) and also long time MTWT supporter, Zsig. British Airways very kindly gave us the extra baggage for free too which was amazing.
Prior to this we had made connections with a wonderful charity called Miracle Missions Vimba, who work out of a Township called Hatcliff in Harare, who’s aim is to help local Zimbabweans become self sufficient. We also made a link with BTA who are a big Tennis operator in the north of the city, who kindly offered to host our event at their club.
After an almost seamless transition through security at Robert Mugarbe international airport we collected the kit and made our way ready for the open day the next morning. We had 60 children coming and amazingly had a racket to give every child and a t-shirt paid for by our generous sponsor Accuracy Consultants in London. The kids ranged in age from 5 to 13 and with the help of 5 local coaches from BTA we had 2 hours of fun games and Tennis. Our friend Leroy also helped with translating into Shona for us too!
The children were so well behaved and respectful and seemed to have a wonderful time. BTA owner Nate “the Captain” Hook also managed to get the local KFC to bring food for all the children after too!
I can honestly say it was the best event I have ever been part of in my 20 years + coaching career and to see the kids enjoying Tennis themselves was something very special. The even better news is that BTA have kindly offered to continue the coaching once every week or 2 if we can find a way of getting the children to and from the venue which is 20 minutes away. The cost on the local bus is $1 each way so we set out to see how we could fund this.
Fast forward to Christmas and we have managed to raise $3000 for the project to continue into 2025! As of February 1st, 40 children will get to go to BTA and have a weekly Tennis lesson delivered by the wonderful coaches there. What an opportunity! We (G Tennis) are now looking at how we can start a leadership and mentoring programme so older teens can start to look into coaching and then hopefully coach the next generation of players coming through.
