Our (Your) Tennis Academy
Welcome to the Imamovic-Ayer Tennis Academy. We are pleased that you have chosen to be part of our Academy that emphasizes tennis skills and strategies, fitness, and wellness while making new friends in a safe, tobacco-free, fun, and competitive environment. The Academy's structure is guided by safety, program efficiency and effectiveness, service quality, and knowledge, friendliness, and training.
The mission of the Academy is to enhance the lives of children, youth, and adults by providing quality instruction from introductory to high-performance levels of tennis skills and strategies, fitness, and wellness related to the sport in a safe and fun environment, to establish hard-working individuals striving for excellence.
The Academy is a multi-lingual service provider that offers a wide range of tennis programs (including wheelchair tennis) independently and in cooperation with small and large community-based organizations to help increase awareness of the sport and active living. The Academy was initially established in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia in March 2007 and has been sponsored ever since. The Academy is led and operated under the supervision of Nadina in conjunction with her family members, Joel and Uzeir (Uzo), and many friends from local universities, colleges, and communities. Most of the Academy's coaches and volunteers are bilingual and languages spoken at the Academy range from Bosnian (Tuzla), French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Latvian, and Romanian, to name a few.
In 2007, the Academy was founded by Joel and Nadina in Lwr. Sackville, Nova Scotia. It started with a dozen participants and was able to reach 500 participants in 2008. Since 2009 the Academy has been serving participants, schools, and community clubs in Western Ontario, with its most programming taking place in Kitchener-Waterloo, ON (on the private, club, home, and public contract and insured-based surfaces).
While in Ontario, from 2009 to 2012, the Academy delivered provincially funded programs such as "Cardio Tennis" and "Progressive Tennis" for children in over 103 elementary schools introducing 17,697 students to the sport of tennis.
Currently, the Academy's coaches are also involved in coaching practices on international soil including in the United Kingdom and Germany.
Each year the Academy donates 1,000+ used tennis balls to local elementary and high schools. We also give out tennis balls to those with dogs who need an extra chew toy, just ask us!
The Academy cares about causes related to children, education, human rights, and animal welfare and is an active supporter of organizations such as Kid Sport, Jump Start, Right To Play, Girl Up, UN Women, Kitchener-Waterloo Humane Society, and Stratford-Perth Humane Society.
Since 2012, the Academy coaches serve an active role on the Kitchener Waterloo Sports Council committee.