Craig Tiley has a new task: Get 35 million Americans playing tennis by 2035. There probably isn’t a better person for the job

When team sports fans take a step back from their rich fandom, they may face an uncomfortable but enlightening reality: for every diehard New York Yankees fan, there’s a Boston Red Sox fan that loves their team just as much. For every Michigan alumni with maize and blue coursing through their veins, there’s an Ohio State grad that bleeds scarlet and grey. The totality of these nearly religious athletic allegiances is what gives sports its undeniable character.

You may not follow a specific team or player as closely, but instead adhere to a single sport. Tennis, perhaps. Maybe even pickleball these days. You may not believe there are connections deeper than the one you’ve forged with the game you love.

But more than likely, there are countless other attractions with the same intensity. And on this Valentine’s Day, I present one such union that likely has never come to your mind: the country of Barbados with its national sport, road tennis.

Players get low to hit the ball with plenty of underspin.

Advertising

Hardcourt tennis this is not. More like hardscrabble. The only sport indigenous to Barbados, the easternmost Caribbean island with a population of 280,000, road tennis is played with the same rules as table tennis, but that’s where the comparisons end. Players tower over the net—but must stay low to the ground to succeed—as the well-worn ball stays close to a nondescript surface that can be found…nearly everywhere.

And because it’s everywhere, everyone can play it.

“Road tennis was born in the thirties as a means of getting to play tennis because the locals could not afford to play the traditional lawn tennis,” says Dale Clarke, founder and president of the Professional Road Tennis Association (PRTA). “You can find a road tennis court in every community in Barbados.

“We have them basically in our streets.”

A moveable road tennis net, bisecting the court.

Advertising

Back to those differences between road tennis and table (and any other form of) tennis. The court is 21’x10’, and the net—really, the plank of wood bisecting the court—is 8”x12”. When a car approaches on the road, the “net” is simply lifted off the ground to make room, then put back for play. Forget table tennis; the closest comparison to this game might be street hockey.

Like all kinds of love, it grows deeper over time and continues to flourish. Road tennis is incredibly niche, but the sport’s caretakers hope to share it with others around the world.

“We’re in the process of training coaches that we can export,” says Hon. Charles McD. Griffith, Barbados M.P. “We have interest from the European Union. So we are asking the private sector to come on board, to see if we can have it as an Olympic sport.”

Sheldene “Babyface Assassin” Walrond and Mark “Venom” Griffith, the top-ranked players, compete in "The Sauna," an indoor facility for road tennis.

Advertising

Should that come to pass, you can be sure that for every Usain Bolt fan in Jamaica, or Mikaela Shiffrin fan in the United States, there will be a Mark “Venom” Griffith fan and Sheldene “Babyface Assassin” Walrond fan in Barbados. (Relative to population, of course.)

“Girls normally look up to me on the island,” says Walrond, the top-ranked women’s road tennis player in the world. “They will tell me, well one day they would like to become like me.”

“Of course I watch the other formats of tennis, like the lawn tennis,” says Griffith, the top-ranked men’s road tennis player in the world. “My favorite player is Djokovic.

“Of course, I could take [him] on a road tennis court. Not in lawn tennis—but for sure, definitely in road tennis.”

Watch our TenniStory on road tennis from Barbados in the video at the top.