Though Sahana Jayaraman has cut back on playing competitive tennis due to an injury, she is still captain of the varsity team at High School South and consistently wins at third singles. But she can not stay away from the courts and has recently founded the Special Needs Community Tennis Club, a program she developed to teach tennis to children with autism.
Jayaraman began playing tennis when she was seven years old and played competitive tennis until she was 15, when a recurring shoulder problem worsened. She put a halt to competitive tennis after earning the title of the 2009 New Jersey doubles champion. “Those days when I used to wake up at 5 a.m. to practice tennis at an indoor tennis court before I left for school feel like a distant memory now,” she says. It is becoming more difficult to play but her love for tennis has not diminished.
A senior at South, Jayaraman, 17, is a member of the orchestra. She has also been a member of A2Z mentoring teen committee for five years. The group mentors low-income children in the Mercer County area, and Jayaraman is currently the president.
Her mother, Bhuvana Jayaraman, works in Bank of New York Mellon and her father, Jay Veezhinathan, is a business consultant. The family has lived in Plainsboro for 11 years.
When her young cousin was diagnosed with autism Jayaraman was determined to help him in every way possible. “I played games with him, such as hide and seek, or pushed him on the swings, and while doing all this, I tried to teach him certain verbal cues or make him say full sentences,” she says. “From the interactions with my cousin and from my own reading on the subject of autism and sports, I believe that sports can help children with autism.”
Her deep desire to help her cousin later turned into sharing her love for tennis with a child with autism in her community. When she was volunteering for Special Olympics at Princeton Community Park more than a year ago she met a young boy with autism.
“The mother of the child asked my dad if I could teach tennis one-on-one in my spare time,” says Jayaraman. “I was delighted to have this opportunity and have been working once a week with this child. It has been a rewarding and a challenging experience.”
They spend an hour doing ground strokes, volleys, and serves. “I use orange cones as a reminder to show him where to stand and where the boundaries of the court are,” she says. “While doing ground strokes, the main challenge is to keep him focused and active.” During the first few sessions his mother helped to keep him focused, but he soon began to respond and listen to her.
“The more times we hit, he has improved to being able to keep up a light rally for 20 shots or more,” says Jayaraman. “I also notice that he has a great instinct for volleys, and rushes closer to the net to hit them, and his energy during volleys is great to see.”
While serves were the most difficult for him to understand, Jayaraman meshed his love of geometry with tennis and uses math vocabulary to explain where his serve should land. “Throughout the entire hour, his smiles and laughter gives me such pleasure and satisfaction,” she says. “It is worth the patience and effort to help him focus.”
“Though I was having an impact on one person’s life through tennis, I wanted to expand this tennis training to teach more children with autism as well,” she says. Jayaraman did some research, formed the Special Needs Community Tennis Club, and was able to get funding from Middle States Tennis Association, a chapter of USTA.
“Autism is a disorder that affects the way people interact with others and the way in which they express their emotions,” says Jayaraman. “It’s common to find them doing some sort of self-stimulator behavior, such as hitting something or spinning an object, which shows that they’re in their own world.” People with autism tend to need a distraction.
“The biggest challenge for parents, whose child has autism, however, is getting them to interact more naturally with others,” says Jayaraman. “For many children, playing sports is one of the biggest ways in which they meet others and interact with them.”
When she recruited Milosh Popovic, a student from Princeton High School, they were able to begin teaching two children weekly in a public court. She has recently recruited eight friends from High School South to volunteer.
After a successful outdoor program Jayaraman was on a mission to secure court space to use for the program during the winter months. Gwen Guidice, the director of the Princeton Tennis Program at Eve Kraft Community Tennis Center on Washington Road in West Windsor, offered indoor court space once a week throughout the year free of cost and was interested in having student volunteers run the program.
Jayaraman recruited some of her tennis friends from High School South and now there are 12 student volunteers who will be working with five autistic children. For information about the program visit www.ptp.org or call Guidice at 609-520-0015. To volunteer contact Sahana Jayaraman at 609-275-9499. The free program runs under the auspices of Princeton Tennis Program partly supported by Sri Anna foundation. It begins Saturday, September 24, at 3 p.m.
“My goal to have the program continue successfully for years to come, even after my high school graduation,” says Jayaraman.
