The Rafa Nadal and Vicente Ferrer Foundations: a pairing of combined effort where sport and education have a transformative power

After ten years of collaboration, the Rafa Nadal Foundation and Vicente Ferrer Foundation have renewed our agreement, committing therefore to continue with our joint project carried out in Anantapur district in India. The NETS project (Nadal Educational Tennis School) has the goal to improve hundreds of children’s lives, with the practice of tennis as part of their integral education.

In this educational tennis center we can see, day by day, how the union between education and sport is the key for personal and community change. Both elements reinforce each other in a way that the academic factor joins the daily physical routine, which contributes to well-being and health —at an individual level—, and at the same time encourages greater social cohesion, cohabitation and harmony at a very young age.

Thanks to NETS, children from the area have the opportunity to practice tennis and study English and Computers, through which they acquire skills and values, and their integration and social cohesion are reinforced, regardless their caste or gender. Moreover, the project offers the students other activities such as sport and cultural excursions, medical check-ups, a daily nutritional supplement and the possibility to participate in an intercultural exchange with the Rafa Nadal Academy by Movistar.

The center has five tennis courts —two of them are synthetic, which visibly reduce the expenditure on water, an important issue in the extremely arid area of Andhra Pradesh—, so the 255 students we are planning to reach this course can play tennis.

The combined work between the Rafa Nadal Foundation and Vicente Ferrer Foundation brings up inspiring stories, such as Pallavi’s, a student from NETS. She is from a small village near Anantapur and comes from a family with few resources, and her life started to change in 2010, when she decided to join the school. During these years of training, her achievements and perseverance at the center have made possible that this year she became part of the group of coaches.