Community Tennis
Ideas for grass roots tennis
Community Tennis
Always be explicit about the use case being mapped – it provides context and helps identify related scenarios.
If your project is about making things better, organizing the disorganized, connecting the disconnected and building community, you shouldn’t wait until the conditions are ideal.
Broken systems need your help precisely because they’re broken.
Seth Godin
Successful cultures embrace bigger circles.
Everyone wants to attend parties, but no one wants to throw them. We just expect them to appear when we need them, like fire trucks. My point is that we are obligated to create the social world we want. Intimacy, togetherness-the opposite of the crushing loneliness so many people seem to feel-are what parties alchemize.
There’s a lot of alpha in being willing to do “menial” work (take notes, send out agendas, order pizza, manually inspect raw data, whatever). Beware over-delegation and being too far from the details.
Taste is the bone-deep feeling that you’ve made something good. It is a sense, inexplicable and ephemeral. But it’s also a tangible skill that’s increasingly essential. Taste is how a business differentiates itself when attention is scarce and choice is abundant. Knowing what to make is just as important as the ability to make it.
“You never realize that you are making a memory at the moment something is actually happening."
Estée Lauder's biography Estée: A Success Story
Despite all of these innovations, what really set Midtown apart was the commitment to actively creating and teaching tennis players, not just selling memberships and court time. Alan made this perfectly clear, saying, “We love the game of tennis. We want everyone in the whole world to play tennis. We are going to create beginners.”
