Anyone for Tennis?

Tennis was the main sport played this Saturday at Epping Forest Sportability Club
The session started as always with a warm-up - led by Ray this week. As you can see in the photos below this includes bending and stretching all the muscles and a little jogging around the hall before a tag game.

The tennis started with some basic such as balancing the ball on the racket; bouncing the ball on the racket and lastly bouncing the ball between racket and the ground. This was just to get the kids comfortable with the rackets and speed of the tennis balls and how hard to hit them.
They then went on to work in pairs with one throwing the ball for the other to hit back. Then switching around to ensure everyone got a turn at hitting.​

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​​Next up was a game which can be really funny called Build-a-burger. The kids have to create a stack like a burger of racket then ball then racket then ball etc etc. With the balls being round (Obviously!) it makes it really tricky to keep it all balanced and can lead to quite a few laughs.
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The next Tennis based game was Champion where the kids form a line. Normally a ball would be thrown by the coach in the middle and whoever caught the ball would move up a spot and whoever fails to catch it would move to the bottom spot in line. This being a tennis based game though instead of catching the ball and throwing it back to the coach they had to hit it back using the racket. Hitting it back wildly to somewhere else in the hall was no good  - it had to be back to the middle so the coach could catch it. 
The last tennis game was King of the Court which we normally play outside in the summer. The kids have to try and hit the ball back over the net, and in to the court, and not get caught in order to survive for the next round. Fail to get the ball back over the net or miss the court or get caught then you join the other side doing the fielding and trying to catch the others out. The last person left in is King, or Queen, of the court.

After the break we rounded off the session with a game or two of Boccia then a game of Benchball. Boccia is quite sedate, a game of skill. Whereas Benchball is fast, furious and often very loud with lots of calling and shouting.

It was a good session with a lot of participation and a variety of sports. The Star of the Week award was awarded to little Bilal. He comes most weeks with his Dad but this week they stayed a lot longer than usual and he put in a great performance. He is a lovely young lad who is quite quiet but a few more years of Sportability and he will hopefully be as loud as the rest of them!
We hope you see you again this weekend  - it much better fun than going to school xmas fayre's honest!

Our Star this week was Bilal pictured here with Teagan