Cheshire Academy student-athlete Chase Harding has a dream of making tennis accessible to kids in Jamaica.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Jamaica, tennis is not one of the sports that is very exposed,\u201d he said. \u201cJamaica is known for like track and field.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harding grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, and has been playing tennis for eight years. He says it\u2019s a sport where you need resources, which often cost money that people on the island don\u2019t have. Over his summer break, he decided to host a tennis clinic for kids in the inner-city neighborhood of Payne Land.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a great experience just to empower the next generation, because these are kids that probably would never have had the chance to hold a racket,\u201d he said. \u201cJust to know that I was the one to physically place a racket in their hands, that\u2019s just a great feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harding brought donated rackets and source equipment from his tennis coach in Jamaica. He and his team set up portable nets on gravel and taught the kids basic tennis skills.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just spent the whole day playing tennis with the kids and teaching them about the sport,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Harding says he wants to go on to represent his country at the Davis Cup and eventually play college tennis.<\/p>\n
He plans to host another clinic during his winter and spring breaks and says he wants to expand to other parishes in Jamaica that have less access to tennis.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s great to see what he\u2019s doing,\u201d said Chip Boyd, Harding’s current high school coach. \u201cI think there\u2019s a lot of good to be developed through tennis in Jamaica.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cheshire Academy student-athlete Chase Harding has a dream of making tennis accessible to kids in Jamaica. \u201cIn Jamaica,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366917,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,157193,82,593],"class_list":["post-366916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-connecticut-in-color","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}