Beneath the impossibly blue skies of the Caribbean paradise of Anguilla, I sat in the shade of a palm tree, watching pairs of teenagers playing tennis on rows of immaculate courts.
These weren’t the offspring of well-to-do vacationers. They were local children who were members of the Anguilla Tennis Academy, the fancy-sounding name of an institution that began 21 years ago with the primary goal of making tennis affordable for ordinary Anguillan kids and teaching them all the life lessons that go along with dedicating themselves to becoming good at a sport.
The academy is the brainchild of Mitchelle Lake who was once a local kid himself, but was able to translate his own skill at tennis into a scholarship at an American university. He wants to use the academy to give a new generation of Anguillan kids the chance to have the same opportunity that he did.
