About Jemima
Fourteen-year-old Jemima has achieved remarkable success. This year, she became the East London regional champion in the UK's largest youth public speaking competition, secured work experience opportunities with both Microsoft and sports law firm Onside Law, and was selected as a school prefect.
These achievements are even more impressive considering that Jemima arrived in the UK from Bangladesh just five years ago, speaking very little English and lacking the confidence to raise her hand in class.
The power of tennis
Jemima attributes her transformation to the skills she has learned through tennis, a sport she once thought was “only for posh girls”, and, more specifically, to her Greenhouse Sports coach, Tom Sippy, who has been a mentor and confidant since she took up the sport three years ago.
Jemima did not come from a sporty family and had never considered playing tennis. As a newly arrived nine-year-old, she taught herself English by watching TV cartoons such as SpongeBob SquarePants.
“I was a quiet girl who sat passively at the back of the class, so I wasn’t that great at school,” she says.
Before starting the sessions, Jemima had never picked up a racket and, at first, found tennis boring. But she persisted, joined the after-school club and improved rapidly, making new friends and earning a place on the school team.
Jemima says the lessons she learned through tennis helped her grow in confidence both on and off the court, explaining: “Coach Tom made me realise it is okay to mess up and miss. And because I was a beginner, I missed more than I hit. Failure was intensely frustrating, but eventually I hit more than I missed, and I realised: missing is a means to an end. It made me braver and I took more risks in my personal life. Becoming a prefect was never on the cards for me - without Tom’s encouragement, I would never have gone for it.”
Coach Tom Sippy says: "She's come to this country at nine barely speaking English and look at what she's achieved. She's not afraid to fail and she has resilience. This is the culture we try to create at Greenhouse."
I missed more than I hit. Failure was intensely frustrating, but eventually I hit more than I missed, and I realised: missing is a means to an end. It made me braver and I took more risks in my personal life.
According to Tom, Jemima has become one of the top three doubles players at her school, and she regularly beats both girls’ and boys’ pairs from other schools, some of whom have had private coaching since the age of eight. “She’s a brilliant reflex volleyer,” says Tom. “The word among the other girls is, ‘Keep it away from Jemima when she’s at net’.”
For Jemima, the biggest change has been her confidence. “My dream has always been to become a surgeon, but in my heart of hearts I never thought I was good enough,” she says. “Now Coach Tom calls me a superstar. I back myself to get into medicine and achieve my dream.”
*Content adapted from, and images provided by The Standard.
What LTA Tennis Foundation funded
LTA Tennis Foundation awarded a grant to Greenhouse Sports to introduce tennis coaching and mentoring activities to thousands of young people from underserved communities. The funding is being used to scale up Greenhouse Sports’ established tennis coaching and mentoring activities so that 2,400 young people aged nine to 16 from underserved communities will discover the benefits of tennis.
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