This article was originally published in the Winter 2024 (Goldenrod) Edition of the Portland Tennis Courterly
Public Tennis Instruction Monolingual No More
by Jay Boss Rubin
Linguistic diversity has arrived to the City of Portland’s public tennis programming in the form of ball machine drills conducted in Spanish and in Japanese. Conversations about how to better serve the city’s underrepresented language communities started within the Bureau of Parks & Recreation’s leadership team. In September 2023, Portland Tennis Center (PTC) began offering a recurring “Clase de tenis con maquina lanza pelotas en español,” taught by Coach David Rojas, a pro who is bilingual in Spanish and English. Spanish is by far the most widely spoken language in Portland, other than English. But once the multilingual gato is out of the bolso, the figurative feline is free to roam. The following month, Coach Wakana Turner began teaching a ball machine class in Japanese.
Eventually, PTC hopes to expand its non-English offerings into different age groups, types of classes and additional languages. Recreation Coordinator Ezra James explained that ball machine drills were the best type of class to begin with, in terms of access, because they’re “low pressure,” don’t require a rating and can accommodate players of various skill levels. Previewing languages that could be added, James noted that among coaches working at PTC there are also speakers of Vietnamese, Italian, Portuguese and Tagalog.
¿Alguien puede registrarse? While no sort of “language rating” is required to register, James pointed out that the online description of the Spanish-language ball machine drills, which Coach David came up with, is entirely en español. This makes for somewhat of a self-selecting group. Does that mean anyone curious about Spanish can sign up, even if they don’t know their derecha from their revés, or think “globo” refers only to a literal balloon? James stopped short of discouraging the use of the classes for language-learning purposes; they emphasized that the new offerings are intended to be safe spaces for members of the given language communities. Parks & Rec is still in the process of getting the word out to Portland’s Spanish and Japanese speakers. For the time being, there is ample room in the classes for multilinguals, players less proficient in English, heritage speakers and aspiring polyglots alike.
Not that those categories are mutually exclusive or cut and dry. Linguistic identity, like athletic ability, is famously fluid and dependent on context. The potential for any confusion around questions of inclusion will be at least partially limited by the fact that tennis is an increasingly diverse and globally minded sport. It’s a game with what Iranian-American poet and translator Roger Sedarat described as “universal referents.” Sedarat, who is an English professor, avid doubles player, and author of a book of tennis poems called Foot Faults, added that only a few words are needed to play an entire match. “The shared understanding of scores, faults, et cetera,” he explained, “naturally invites attempts at interlingual communication. Whatever language that's spoken between players already has a better chance of getting across, or rather over, the net.”
Multilingual communication plays a role in rooting on professionals, too. What Alcaraz fan, advanced at Spanish or not, hasn’t shouted “¡Vamos Carlitos!” at their televisión during some armrest-gripping turn of the tide?
While tennis translates well across languages, variation within languages is as common as variation within groundstrokes. One Spanish-speaker’s vocabulary isn’t necessarily the same as another’s, even when it comes to terms used for the same sport. A participant in Coach David’s class observed that the instructor, who hails from Colombia, uses the terms “bola” and “pelota” somewhat interchangeably, and does the same with “cancha” and “campo.” In the participant’s previous experiences with tenis en español, at public courts in Union City, New Jersey, a coach from Venezuela used only “pelota” to refer to the ball, and never anything but “cancha” to refer to the court. The same participant—who is conversant in Spanish, but not a native speaker or heritage speaker—found the application of familiar words in new contexts helpful and refreshing. Coach David’s tip to maintain “más distancia” between him and the bola, for instance, was easier for him to internalize and put into practice than the corresponding advice in English, which turns on “position,” a word that’s arguably more subjective.
On some level, even tennis played exclusively in English is actually a furtive multilingual experience. John McEnroe recalls, in an early episode of McEnroe’s Places, that when we say “love-love” to kick off a game, that’s not a nod to on-court amore; “love” comes from the French “l'œuf,” or “the egg,” he says. While Merriam-Webster disputes this theory as “folk etymology,” anyone who’s ever gotten goose-egged at Colonel Summers Park knows that the shape of an œuf resembles a zero. Could PTC’s embrace of tennis across languages spill over into multilingual pick-up matches? If you hear players announcing “huevo-huevo” or “tamago-tamago” before blasting their opening serves, you’ll know the answer is affirmative.
The Courterly plans to report back as PTC’s offerings in languages other than English expand, settle into monthly slots and attract greater attention. Does this amateur dialectologist anticipate any matata resulting from the city’s efforts to increase access and enrich linguisticity in the dunia of Portland tennis? In a word—or in a series of words, all corresponding: いいえ; không; não; hindi; нет; لا; no.