Just before 9a.m. on a sweaty summer morning on Tucson's South Side, the entire Gamez crew rolls up to Desert View High School wielding rackets.
For the last three years, Francisco, a freshman at the UA; Alan, a Sunnyside High School sophomore; Leslie, an eighth-grader; and 6-year-old Nirma have come here — to the heart of the South Side — to attend one of the most respected tennis camps in Southern Arizona.
Although rarely talked about among the hotbeds of top-tier tennis in the Tucson area, Desert View High School is home to the flourishing Southside Tennis Academy, allowing lower-income kids to find their place among the affluent tennis world for $10 per week.
Do not let the cost fool you; the instruction is second to none.
"It seems like the people that coach you, and the way they work you, you can tell that they want to see you get better," said Alan Gamez, who played for the Blue Devils last season. "They define what I am doing wrong and fix it."
"The kids you get at this camp are really receptive to the teaching they are getting," said former UA tennis player Jessie Rochefort. "They aren't pampered or forced to go to camp by their parents, like a lot of the kids you see at other places."
For the second time in the last three years, the Southside Tennis Academy was nominated as the best camp in the Southwest by the United States Tennis Association National Junior Tennis League (USTANJTL).
"Everything about this place makes it a good place to get a hold of what tennis is about," said Francisco Gamez, now an instructor at the camp. "It helped me when I was still trying to understand the game."
Fifty-six campers attended this year's academy, ranging in age from 4 to the late teens. "You get to see the whole kind of spectrum," said another former UA standout, Kasia Jakowlew. "You get to see the year-to-year changes from when they are younger to where they are right now."
Leslie Gamez said she has seen her game transformed by the camp.
"I feel like I'm improving just being here," said Leslie Gamez, who attends Sierra Middle School. "My forehand is the best it's ever been. (The instructors) know what they are doing." In the 11 years Haines has been at the helm, the academy has produced 11 college tennis players, from Claudia Meza in the camp's earliest years, who went on to play at Stetson University, to Bethany Kashian last year, who played at Pima Community College.
"The coaches here are allowed to push these kids as hard as they can, and the kids you get here like being pushed," said Haines. "And the results they get are pretty incredible."
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