Is your college looking for creative ways to encourage your students to take part in sport more regularly? Try Mini Tennis and Cardio Tennis to get your students hooked on being active.

Cardio Tennis and Mini Tennis are two completely different types of tennis that can be played by Further Education students who are new to the sport making the game enjoyable for all at college.

Mini Tennis

Playing tennis is great fun and by using modified equipment and space, everyone can achieve, whether they have played before or not. Mini Tennis is an established modified version of the sport that has assisted many young children to develop their skills before heading onto the full court.

Realising the immediate benefit of using shorter rackets, softer balls and smaller courts has encouraged us to introduce these modifications to the more mature learner.

Another great benefit of mini tennis is that you don’t need a tennis court – it can be played in a sports hall, on badminton courts, any large indoor space, or even on a free strip of car park.  This fun, modified version of the game allows more FE students to participate at a level that is appropriate for them, which improves their achievement, making them want to play again.

A range of over 70 Mini Tennis Activity Cards are also available to download online, to help plan and deliver activities. The activity cards provide ideas for ABCs, tricks, drills, main theme and competitive activities.  Many of the activities on the cards can also be adapted to support lecturers to incorporate tennis into a range of the BTEC L3 Sports units eg. Sports Coaching, Practical Individual Sports, Leadership in Sport.  The cards can also be used by your Sports Leaders to plan and deliver tennis activities suitable for local primary and secondary school pupils.  A number of colleges are already using these resources to run festivals and competition days for local schools, providing the students with valuable experience to test out their leadership skills, take a look at the case studies on our website for further ideas. 

Mini Tennis is great for intra-college competition.  Task the sports students to organise a competition for their BTEC Unit: Organising Sports Events. 

Click here for various formats and ideas for organising intra-college competition.

Cardio Tennis 

Another great way to introduce FE students to tennis for the first time, is through Cardio Tennis. Cardio Tennis is a fun group activity, featuring drills using Mini Tennis balls to give pupils of all abilities a fun, high energy workout to music. 

There are activities for absolute beginners through to advanced players, all of which provide you with a great cardio workout whilst improving your tennis skills. 

Music is played during the session to help create a high energy atmosphere and add motivation, as well as controlling the tempo of the activity.

If available, participants are advised to wear heart rate monitors or pedometers, so they can see how hard they are working. The measure of a pupils’ success becomes their heart rate, calories burnt, or number of steps taken, rather than the number of balls hit over the net and in the court. 

More than 400 coaches have been trained to deliver Cardio Tennis. Why not ask your local coach to come in to college and deliver Cardio Tennis as part of your extra curricular programme?

Staff Training

The three-hour ‘Cardio Tennis Teacher Training Course’ has been developed to provide college sports lecturers and secondary school PE teachers with the knowledge and skills to deliver Cardio Tennis within a college or school environment. The Tennis Foundation / LTA provide annual funding to local LTA Tennis Development Managers to enable lecturers and teachers to attend courses for free, contact your local Tennis Development Manager to book onto a local course.

Find out more about Cardio Tennis

Student Tennis Ambassadors

Student Tennis Ambassadors - Recruit a Student Tennis Ambassador to support staff with promoting and delivering your tennis enrichment sessions.  Your Ambassador does not have to be a regular tennis player but they should be a pro-active sports leader with an interest in tennis, who can help to drive tennis participation in the college.  A few examples of their role could include:

o    Promoting tennis as part of your enrichment programme (regular tennis, Mini Tennis or CardioTennis); promoting these opportunities at Freshers Fair and throughout the year; and leading some of the enrichment activities which could be ‘tennis tasters’, lunch clubs or intra competitions.

o    Leading a small group of ambassadors to help set up student-led activity.

o    Taking a lead role to help your staff train and mentor sports leaders to support primary school tennis activities eg. Festivals, competitions, curriculum support.