Several decades after retiring from professional tennis, former South Carolina All-American Laura Bernstein Kassirer (1981-83) hasn’t exactly hung up the racquet and is making a huge impact in the lives of children with the sport she loves. Kassirer, who will be the first women’s tennis player inducted into the University of South Carolina Athletics Hall of Fame during the weekend of October 28-30, is the president and founder of Youth League Tennis, a non-profit public benefit charitable 501(c)3 organization for kids ages 5-14.
“For the past twenty-five years, I’ve been providing afterschool tennis enrichment programs at schools, and for the past twenty years, I’ve also been running a non-profit tennis league called Youth League Tennis,” said Kassirer, who lives in Los Angeles. “We run this all over California and Texas. I’ve made hundreds of thousands of new junior tennis players. For the after-school enrichment, we’re actually doing soccer, basketball, track, volleyball, ultimate frisbee, and pickleball. We’re involved in a lot of sports that kids can be passionate about getting involved with and hopefully play at least through high school.”
She initially started the afterschool enrichment program when her oldest daughter, Rachel, was in kindergarten.
“There were no little kid-friendly tennis programs,” Kassirer said. “If they wanted to learn how to play tennis, they had to play on a full-size court. They didn’t have the youth programs that we have today. I called Wilson and asked if they would send me fifty rackets and five hundred balls so I could start teaching tennis to kids in schools.”
It turned out that the president of Wilson was someone that Kassirer had known from her days on the professional tour, and the company agreed to help her out. She went to various schools where she lived in California and started teaching youngsters, and it took off.
“It was unbelievable how we were spreading the love of the game, so then I started hiring other coaches,” Kassirer said. “I wanted to get them to start playing on the courts in local clubs and begin competing. We give unlimited scholarships for kids to participate. The full-paying students basically subsidize the scholarship kids. Our philosophy is that we don’t turn any kids away. There are around eight thousand kids in the two programs per year.”
One of the many success stories can be found with Katrina Scott, who got her start with the Youth League…