Program aims to bring tennis to kids with visual impairments

Six weeks after Domiana Costa was born five years ago, her parents, Dana and Dom, were told by her ophthalmologist that because of their daughter’s limited vision, sports were not in her future.Children tennis in Shanghai

“The doctor said, ‘She’s never going to play tennis, never going to play baseball or anything else like that,’” Ms. Costa said Saturday. “And now she plays everything.”

Her parents have let her try every sport she wanted, and despite what is technically called “congenital fibrosis of the extra ocular muscles,” Domiana plays t-ball baseball — with visually unimpaired kids — and hockey for blind and visually impaired kids like herself.

While attending the Pittsburgh Penguins-sponsored Blind Ice Hockey program, which uses a larger puck with bearings in it to help the players both see and/or hear the puck better, Ms. Costa — an avid tennis player —had an epiphany.

“I was like, ‘How can I do this for tennis?’” and make tennis adaptive to kids like her daughter.

Her research taught her that there are tennis programs that have evolved for blind or visually impaired players, with national programs in 32 counties, including the United Kingdom.

But there was no such program in the Pittsburgh area, and just a few across the country. The United States Tennis Program, which has other programs for kids in wheelchairs and those with autism, had not yet started a program for the visually impaired.

Ms. Costa discovered that if it was going to get done, she would have to build a program in Pittsburgh from the ground up.

On Saturday, after a year’s work with help from Envision Blind Sports, Slippery Rock University, the Pittsburgh Tennis League and the Highland Park Tennis Club, Ms. Costa and her supporters kicked off what they hope evolves into a full-fledged program with regular matches and maybe a league for the visually impaired.

Just seven players, including Domiana showed up Saturday. But that was by design.

“This is our very first event, so we wanted to keep it small till we figure it out,” said Jen Roth, a member of the board of directors for the Highland Park Tennis Club, for which Ms. Costa is board president.

It took a lot of work to get to Saturday.

Ms. Costa did her research on how to teach tennis to visually impaired players. She spent time with an instructor at the Envision sports camp that is run for a week every summer at Slippery Rock, and she contacted some of the directors of tennis programs in Scotland and Ireland where they have leagues for visually impaired players.

One of the first points she learned is that it would be expensive to buy the kinds of balls those programs use. The balls are made out of foam, which makes them move slower, and have an inner plastic core with BBs in them that rattle so the players can locate the ball. The balls are made in Japan and cost $15 each.