About Hamptons Ace Tennis

Hamptons Ace Tennis is how a player or a parent on the South Fork finds a tennis coach — not a club, a camp or a court operator. We teach nobody ourselves. Tell us who's learning, their level, and where you're based between Southampton and Montauk, and we put you in touch with one certified, background-checked coach who teaches that age and level.

Fit is the whole thing

A great coach for one player is the wrong coach for another, and the gap has nothing to do with how good either one is. A former college player who runs a tournament-track group at a club you can't join is exactly right for a competitive twelve-year-old heading to her first tournament, and exactly wrong for a five-year-old with a foam ball. A coach who is wonderful with five-year-olds can be bored by teenagers, and neither may suit an adult who played in college decades ago and wants the strokes rebuilt before anyone sees them. None of that shows up on a certification card — it shows up in the first twenty minutes on court, usually after the lesson is paid for.

What we ask before we introduce anyone

Before we introduce anyone, we ask for the player's age and level, whether they've held a racquet before or are chasing a ranking, and what the actual goal is — teaching a nine-year-old to love the game and coaching one to compete are different jobs. We ask where the lessons would happen: a court at the house, a club membership, or one of the public courts scattered across the nine towns, because a coach who teaches at Montauk Downs isn't necessarily one who can get on a member's court in Southampton. And we ask what kind of lesson the player needs, because a private, a group and a camp week call for different coaches.

Credentials, plainly

Two certifications exist for tennis coaches in the United States: the RSPA, the renamed USPTA, with four tiers running from Instructor up to Master Professional, and the PTR. We ask every coach for a current card from one of them, and RSPA's own directory lets us verify it in a minute rather than take a coach's word. A certification is not a background check, so we ask for that separately: a current USTA Safe Play screening or an equivalent commercial check, no exceptions for anyone teaching children. Beyond the paperwork, we ask what no certification covers: how they handle a child who isn't enjoying it.

What it costs

Nothing, for players and parents. Participating coaches pay us a referral fee for the introduction. You pay the coach at their rate, and we do not sell your details to anyone.

On the prices we quote

Almost no coach or club in the Hamptons publishes a rate card, so most of the numbers here come from the few that do — one club's published lesson rate, one camp company's weekly table, a state park's fee page — plus New York or national numbers everywhere a Hamptons figure doesn't exist, labeled as such. Where sources disagree, we print both rather than pick one. Where a source simply wouldn't load for us — USTA's, the US Open's, the PTR's — we say so and leave the number out, rather than guess.