Tommy Cardinal, USPTA Communications

There are six tennis-teaching professionals at the Princess Anne Country Club, and when there’s a divisional conference nearby, they all pack up to go, including Tennis Director John Fraser.

Fraser is an Elite Professional and director of tennis at the Princess Anne. He pitched the idea of bringing the entire staff to USPTA Mid-Atlantic Conferences 15 years ago when he first started at the club in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He and his staff have returned each year since. The club pays the bill to send the staff out of town for these conferences.

“That’s how progressive our board of directors is,” Fraser said. “They see a huge value in being able to have their staff continue their education so they’re at the top of their game, and they feel like it’s a win-win in terms of them putting forth the best product in terms of our teaching staff.”

An entire teaching staff packing up and heading to a conference for a weekend might seem problematic to clients back home, but the stars align every year so that Fraser and his staff can attend without leaving membership teacherless for the weekend. 

“It’s that first weekend of spring break for our private schools. That means our club turns to a ghost town that week,” Fraser said. “I think it’s somehow just the perfect storm because there’s so many people gone that even if we stayed, we’d be twiddling our thumbs anyway. 

“We’re really only gone from Friday through Sunday and back to work on Monday, and we usually do a good job of letting everyone know that it’s coming up.”

Through years of attending conferences and working together, the tennis-teaching staff at the Princess Anne has become closer, Fraser said. 
“We’re in a pretty unusual situation, I think, as far as teams go, we’re all good friends, not just colleagues,” Fraser added. “We do stuff together – concerts, movies, go out for a beer. We do other activities besides work together and certainly have a really good time going to the conferences and learning.”

Continuing education, a weekend off and staff bonding are just a few of the benefits these trips have to the Princess Anne staff. There’s also the networking. Fraser even hired Nathan Bolling after they met at the Mid-Atlantic conference eight years ago. Bolling is an Elite Professional and is the assistant pro who is head of junior programming at the Princess Anne.

“We’ve been going to these things since I’ve been employed at the Princess Anne,” Bolling said. “I actually met John [Fraser] at one of these conferences. Feisal Hassan had an on-court demo that I participated in. From there, it really gave John a pretty good idea of who I was, spending that weekend with him. When we got back, I interviewed for the job and he gave me the job immediately, but it was largely in part due to the exposure at the conference itself.”

A staff from different backgrounds and different teaching styles can mean discrepancies in teaching strategies, and Fraser said that attending the conferences has helped the staff with teaching consistency. 

“With teaching tennis, we all have our similar styles,” Bolling said. “We say things the same way, but we don’t always say them in the same language, and sometimes that other language is what helps the student get it. What the USPTA conference really does is it gives us some gems. It gives us these little things to hold onto, whether they’re analogies or just ways to communicate the material.”

Technically, the staff hasn’t left town every year for the last 15 years because the Princess Anne hosted the conference recently. 

“We actually hosted it three years ago and I gave a presentation. My wife also gave a presentation because she owns the pro shop here and has done well with it, which is not something you see a lot in our business. Pro shops in this day and age are not thriving typically.”

Tennis is a family affair in the Fraser family with John as tennis director and his wife, Charmagne, running the pro shop. The two have been together for 30 years. Their three children, Ian, Cameron and Zoe, all play tennis as well.

His tennis-teaching career started at a club in Huntsville, Alabama. He became a tennis director after four years there and has been a director for 25 years. Fraser found his current position at the Princess Anne while browsing the USPTA website’s job openings page on a rainy day.

“I was just surfing the job listings just to see what was out there and saw the Princess Anne job,” Fraser said. “I said to my wife ‘Hey, check out this place on the beach!’”

Fraser grew up in South Africa and started playing tennis at 10-years-old when his grandmother bought him a tennis racquet for his birthday.  He got a feel for the game by hitting with his father, who played in high school. He then got lessons at a public court nearby and has been playing ever since.