Manhasset tennis player Holweger awarded for racket donations, skills clinic

Bill San Antonio

When Manhasset High School senior Matthew Holweger launched the Long Island chapter of Kids Serving Kids during the 2013-14 school year to collect tennis rackets and raise money for youth clinics, he was at first unsure of the support he’d receive from the friends and neighbors he sought for help.

But after the first two weeks, he’d collected 50 rackets. At the end of the first year, he’d gathered 300 rackets and about $2,000.

“I honestly was surprised,” said Holweger, a leading singles player at Manhasset. “I wasn’t expecting anything other than achieving my community service requirement and helping the community.”

The venture has been so successful — Holweger said he has completed the school’s required 15 community service hours — that the board of the U.S. Tennis Association’s Long Island Region awarded Holweger its junior volunteer of the year at a dinner Wednesday at the Crest Hollow Country Club in Woodbury.

“I met with the board in November and discussed with them the racket collection and tennis clinic and their board members said they were discussing various candidates and then they awarded it to me,” he said. 

Holweger said he got the idea to start the chapter after watching a 2013 NBC news piece about Michael McCasland, the president of the Kings Country Tennis League in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, who teaches tennis and life skills to children living in public housing.

After some online research, Holweger stumbled upon Kids Serving Kids, which has youth tennis programs in more than 30 cities across the United States, and contacted officials about starting a chapter on Long Island. 

“They’re run by kids like me, collecting rackets and donating them to various charities in the area,” said Holweger, who was assisted in starting the program by junior Brooke DiGia and freshman Brett Weisberg. “I created a brochure and introductory letter and mailed it to friends and neighbors who I thought could help.”

Last summer, Holweger and classmate Courtney Connors hosted a children’s tennis clinic Mondays and Fridays at the Manhasset-Great Neck Equal Opportunity Center, known also as the EOC, which he said they plan to continue after they graduate.

At the conclusion of the clinics, they donated various pieces of equipment, including 70 tennis rackets and four nets, to the EOC, Holweger said.

“I think they really had a lot of fun, but I would say I don’t think any of them had really ever picked up a racket before, so I knew it was going to be a challenge to teach them the basics,” he said. “They seemed to have a lot of fun with it.”

Share this Article