This Entrepreneur Is Growing The Game Of Tennis, Teaching Kids Along The Way

From Walls to Wall Street

John Davey has always loved the game of tennis. Growing up in Detroit, Davey learned to play the “old school” way, just hitting a ball against the wall.

He got good enough to play collegiately at the University of Vermont and had a short stint as a professional before retiring due to injury. Davey then spent his career on Wall Street and as an entrepreneur before taking time off.

With a full-time working wife and kids away at college, Davey spent his free time at clubs teaching kids tennis. He found issues with the game he loved. 

“I started to take a look around and I noticed that kids are getting frustrated, parents are frustrated, you know, a lot of the coaches weren’t necessarily imparting the best knowledge,” Davey said. “I kind of thought back to my early days and came up with this idea, and that was it.” 

The idea? The Fast Track Tennis System. It’s like a basketball shooting machine that rebounds the ball back to you. It also takes cues from a golf simulator. 

A Simple Concept

“It’s a hit, capture, return system,” Davey explained. “You hit the ball into the net. There’s a little machine that tosses it ten feet from the net. You hit the ball into the net. It funnels back down into the machine and pops out again. So, it’s an infinite loop and you can just hit as long as, you know, until your arm falls off.” 

According to Davey, the value comes in the repetition: “Basically, it shoots a ball every three seconds. So that’s 20 balls in a minute. Doing the simple math, that gets you 1,200 balls or ‘repetitions’ in an hour. Nothing else can replicate that level of repetition.” 

It’s a simple concept, but there’s also an element of technology that can aid in growing tennis players. With an added app component Fast Track has software that tracks speed, spin, landing position, and more on a phone.

“I got together with some guys from M.I.T. and we started talking about how we could do this using computer vision, basically the camera on the phone, to track where the ball theoretically would have landed on the court, if you were playing on a real court. It’s hardware and software, and we’ve gamified it as well, which makes it fun.”

Learning with a Legend

After over three years on the market, tennis pros and leaders are starting to take notice. At the same time, Davey began developing his “1-2-3 method,” a ten-part course to teach kids tennis in an accessible way. Now he and former tennis champion and gold medalist Zina Garrison are going across the country to grow the game they love. 

In December, Davey is heading to Austin for the Texas Tennis Coaches Association meeting. 

“Zina will be there with me. And again, we’re talking to the high school coaches. This is a great product for preseason, you know, they can have it in the gym, or even a hallway or classroom, so that kids can get a lot of reps, right? You can have kids that are rehabbing from injuries practicing on it.” 

Another value that Davey says the product brings is the ability to train kids who may not have access to a tennis court.

“What we really think is sort of a foundational goal and mission of the company is to try to grow the game by simplifying it so that kids can learn quicker, make it faster, easier, less expensive, [and] more fun to learn how to play tennis. We’ll be talking to the high school coaches about recruiting the school gym teachers and things like that to, you know, start driving tennis.”

The Hartford, Connecticut, business has clients from around the world, but Davey is interested first and foremost in growing the game at home. 

All About the Fundamentals

“You’re seeing more kids playing college tennis. Like, when I was coming up, you didn’t really go to college to play tennis. You went out and started playing, you know, professionally. But I do think that tennis can be a much more interesting sport for high school kids and college kids.”

Davey noted that countries outside America are known to foster youth tennis development. “We do see a lot of foreign kids coming in and taking those spots on [college] tennis teams now. So obviously we’d like to try to turn that around and see more American kids playing at American universities.” 

Davey’s love of the game shines through talking about the intricacies of learning. He talks about the hours, reps, and technique required to become a pro-level athlete. But like most things in life, it starts with the fundamentals.

Davey repeats an old adage: “It’s not ‘practice makes perfect,’ it’s ‘perfect practice makes perfect.’”   

“What I have found is that a lot of tennis coaches, when they see something like this, they look at it potentially as competition,” he said. “And I say, ‘No, no, that’s completely the wrong way to look at this.’ Everybody can get better by playing more, by hitting more balls. That only makes you a better coach and your kids can advance quicker, or your students can advance quicker if they get more repetitions.”

-See all product details and pricing at the Fast Track Tennis site.