Tennis New Zealand's Wahine project and its impact on female coaching
Tennis New Zealand won the bronze award in the 2023 ITF commendations for efforts made by National Associations under the ITF Advantage All banner to make tennis truly gender-balanced. Chris Bowers looks at TNZ’s ‘Wahine’ initiative.
Helensville Tennis Club just outside Auckland is a modest facility, boasting four artificial grass courts. But its juniors are thriving, thanks to the club’s young and inspiring coach.
Chloé Tilson is just 20, but thanks to the skills and confidence engendered by her national tennis association with the help of a Wahine scholarship, Helensville TC now offers junior coaching on six days a week – until recently it was only two – with Chloé now heading a team of four assistant coaches.
“We have grown what was once a quiet rural club into one of the most popular tennis clubs in this area for junior coaching,” she says. “I have been using the skills I learned on the Junior Development Course, and we receive overwhelmingly positive feedback from parents and caregivers, with most students showing fantastic progress.”
TNZ has had a female element to its coaching strategies for many years, but while the tennis participation rate is largely 50:50 between girls and boys, the National Association identified a massive discrepancy in the number of women who became coaches. In 2021, only 15-20% of coaches in New Zealand were female.
Chloé Tilson Tennis New Zealand Wahine initiative
So TNZ set up a scholarship programme, specifically aimed at female coaches. Called Wahine (the Maori word for female), it offers financial awards for young women who want to move into coaching. A Wahine scholarship can reduce the cost of doing TNZ’s Junior Development Course (JDC) by up to 75%, with the greatest help given to those from more remote areas of the sparsely populated two-island country.
“We have a large percentage of teenage female coaches,” says TNZ’s National Sport Development Manager, Chris Mundell. “But that’s not where we lack equality – it’s the full-time professional coaches making a business of it that we lack. So the question was how we encourage those female assistants who help after school to move into full-time professional coaching?”
Since the Wahine scholarship programme started in 2021, only around 20 female coaches have profited, but the results are becoming apparent, and the ITF has now recognised the initiative through its Advantage All awards.
Chloé Tilson is clearly one of Wahine’s star graduates. She tells the story of a young boy, James*, who she believes has had his confidence revolutionised by what she could teach him from her JDC training.
“James was eager to try tennis, but as he encountered difficulties timing his swing and moving to the ball, his initial excitement began to fade. Comments like ‘I’m terrible at this’ or ‘I’m so bad’ became regular in our sessions, and I could see his confidence wavering.
“Using techniques from my JDC training, I broke his swing into manageable, incremental steps, emphasising consistent progress and celebrating every small victory. Over time, he started hitting the ball more consistently, and with confidence. Witnessing his shift—from seeing tennis as an impossible challenge to discovering joy in the game—was deeply rewarding.
“Several months later, I suggested him for our junior interclub team. But he didn’t reply, and we found out he felt he wasn’t ‘good enough’ to join. So I sat down with him for an honest conversation. I reminded him how far he’d come and reassured him that facing new challenges was key to continued growth. That evening, I received an email from his parents saying he had decided to join the team.
“Today, James is one of our club’s standout players - not just in skill but also in sportsmanship and leadership. He’s become a role model for his peers, often offering insightful feedback to help others improve their game. Watching him evolve from a shy beginner to a confident and inspiring player has been one of the proudest moments of my career, and it reminds me why I’m so passionate about coaching. It’s not just about teaching a sport; it’s about empowering people to believe in themselves.”
Geographically, Chloé is one of the lucky ones, as Helensville is on the edge of New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland, where all the coaching courses take place. For Ashleigh Calder, who grew up in Nelson on the south island, doing her Junior Development Course would have been much harder without the Wahine funding.
“The course has definitely given me an improved outlook to my coaching,” Ash says. “I feel much more confident in delivering high-performance coaching to juniors and adults. It was also great to learn on the JDC more about budgeting within the business and tracking my business numbers – I’ll definitely be doing more of this in the future.
“It has taught and refreshed me on how to apply coaching to a group with kids having a learning disorder. We have one youngster who has great difficulty learning in group environments and wasn’t able to join group activities for this reason, but he has now completed three successive terms of tennis with other kids his age.”
“We haven’t seen the dial turn yet in terms of a wave of female coaches,” adds Chris Mundell, “but by having these young women embedded in the community working full-time as professional coaches, we’re seeing more and more women who will become seen as role models so other young women can follow in their footsteps.
“We know that the main barriers to any coach continuing their education are the cost of the courses, the distance to travel to the courses, and the ability to work with like-minded individuals. So the scholarship sets out to lower these barriers to women continuing their coaching education.
“To keep girls playing, especially through those high school years when we see most of them drop out, they need to have relatable figures who they look up to, so having female coaches is a really important part of that. Historically the female coaches have tended to come from a competitive background, so we’re trying to build a cohort of female coaches who also come from a social/club/community background.”
The ITF Advantage All bronze award includes a grant of $3,000, which TNZ will use to continue helping coaches in more out-of-the-way places.
New Zealand was one of the first tennis countries of the modern era, forming Australasia with Australia to become a founder member of the ITF in 1913. The pioneering Anthony Wilding won Wimbledon four years running (1910-13) and the Australasian championships twice, but since Chris Lewis reached the Wimbledon final in 1983, the country’s only Grand Slam successes have come in doubles. Perhaps the Wahine scholarships will provide the foundations for New Zealand’s next major champion – but even if they don’t, they will certainly spread the tennis gospel to a lot more young women.