ADVANTAGE CLEVELAND TENNIS AND EDUCATION INC
This organization has already been registered
Someone in your organization has already registered and setup an account. would you like to join their team?Profile owner : l*****n@a**********e.o*g
Mission Statement
Providing Cleveland's youth with tennis, wellness, fitness, literacy, STEM, and creative expression programs to promote hope, healthy living and productive futures.
About This Cause
Advantage CLE’s summer camp takes place daily at the Thurgood Marshall Recreation Center in the Hough neighborhood. To date in 2024, over 300 children have participated in the summer camp while our after-school program, PE Teacher support and weekend tennis clinics reached an additional 600 students. Advantage CLE primarily targets students in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD), particularly those in Ward 7, and provides free breakfast and lunch every day to campers. Students then rotate through five sessions per day including an hour of each of the following components: tennis, fitness, wellness/STEM, literacy, and creative expression (which includes art, theater, and music). Advantage CLE began in 2010 as Inner City Tennis Clinics, Inc. (ICTC) to provide Cleveland youth with programming in tennis and educational programs in an annual summer camp. The Cleveland Clinic was the founding partner and provided the initial funds and with the wellness curriculum for the participants. The United States Tennis Association Foundation, the national governing body of the sport, selected Advantage CLE in 2017 to be part of their three-year capacity building initiative designed to improve the productivity and overall effectiveness of the organization. In Fall 2018, Advantage CLE reached their goal to create an after-school ACE program for students at Mary B. Martin Elementary School, a Cleveland Metropolitan School District school in Hough. This successful after-school program included both tennis instruction as well as a leveled-reading intervention program for 1st through 5th grade children. The school provides a classroom space and gymnasium, and supplemented teachers who helped to instruct in the bi-weekly literacy sessions. This partnership expanded in the 2019-20 academic year, which allowed us to reach more children and grow to a second school, Daniel E. Morgan Elementary School, another CMSD school in Hough (until the pandemic shut this expansion down). In 2022, we became the coordinating partner at our original site, Mary B. Martin, and increased our number to 90 students in grades K-8. We also added weekend tennis clinics for 50 players- hoping that our students will receive both educational and tennis programming all year, increasing their chances for academic success. Advantage CLE believes its year-round programming provides the opportunity for children to develop and expand their skills on the court and in the classroom. After a year of online programming in 2020, we returned to in-person programming in 2021 and began our outreach program since our limited camp experience (60 students per session). This increased our numbers by over 300 students in one summer. We also returned to the schools in Fall 2021 to continue to build our tennis, reading, and wellness program in the Hough schools- and this is when we expanded our program from 20-90 students and grew to a four day per week program. In 2022, we expanded our tennis program into 3 new schools, with an exciting new addition of a middle school club team that practices one day per week at Cleveland State with the Division 1 Men's Team as our coaches. We have doubled the number of students playing tennis in the city of Cleveland in one semester by adding this middle school feeder program. By focusing on what we do best, tennis, wellness, and literacy in our after-school program, we can concentrate on growing the game of tennis in the city schools and surrounding neighborhoods. We hope to continue to build skills on and off the court to help children reach their fullest potential. Plan/Program Description Advantage CLE focuses on providing children year-round opportunities to grow academically and socially using the game of tennis as an anchor point. Advantage CLE helps to address the academic, social/emotional, and recreation needs of the Hough community and supports a healthy, drug-free, and violence-free lifestyle for the participating youth. Our summer camp program keeps children meaningfully occupied during the summer while providing quality educational, wellness and tennis instruction with the intent to foster lifelong literacy and sport skills and interests. As noted in our mission statement, Advantage CLE creates a brighter future for the youth of Cleveland by helping them become more educated in a fun and safe environment. The general structure of our camp curriculum is as follows: • Tennis: The purpose of the United States Tennis Association Curriculum is to develop the basics of strokes, scoring, and on-court attitude in several drills, games, and point-play. Team play will be emphasized in weekly competitions. Character traits such as integrity and resiliency will be encouraged. • Fitness: The fitness curriculum is centralized around tennis-associated fitness and focuses on agility, speed, coordination, strength, endurance, as well as mental toughness. Participants will work to increase their scores in each of these areas on a weekly basis. • Wellness: Based off the Cleveland Clinic’s Healthy Habits program, the wellness component emphasizes various topics such as nutrition, safety, stress and anger management, sexual education, and personal hygiene through activities, discussions, and lectures by interactive guest speakers. • Literacy: Students participate in various activities such as learning through projects, crafts, reading assignments, discussions, and journal writing. Young students will work on reading and writing skills. Older students will work on engaging creative writing activities such as ‘zines, digital storytelling, and podcasts. New creative writing programming, through Lake Erie Ink, has been successful. • Creative Expression: Students explore the arts with various crafts, theater, music, and projects that help them work on trying new things in a safe space. Our annual talent show and poetry slam are the hit of the summer program. • STEM: Students participate in science, technology, engineering, and math activities. Curriculum adapted from Case Western Reserve University’s STEM outreach program is the basis of this program. We expect the long-term effects of our program on students will be to lower dropout rates, to reduce overall summer learning loss, and to increase literacy rates as well as promote healthy living. To achieve this, we aim to increase our students’ academic success, self-esteem, nutritional choices, health education and interest in tennis. We strive to become a leader in youth development programming in the City of Cleveland and track our students’ success through their educational journey. Advantage CLE is ready to expand and replicate our after-school program to other elementary schools, increase the number of schools involved in the middle school feeder program, and introduce tennis in CMSD schools by training and supporting physical education teachers throughout the district.