Hi Serving Advantage Family! My name is Jordyn Kuo. I have been with Serving Advantage for the last three years, and serve as the Volunteer Director, a Fundraiser and Grant Writer, and a Coach. Volunteering for Serving Advantage has been one of the greatest experiences of my life, teaching me valuable leadership skills and giving me a brand new perspective on human connection and interaction. We have grown by over 600% over the past three years, with 107+ middle school and high school volunteers and 70+ students. With the graduation of our founders, Jacob Eusebio, Andy Loughran, and Natalie Rodriguez, we have established a leadership team with 10 members, who have taken over the on-court and business work. Our Leadership Team is divided into 6 different committees specializing in Coaching, Volunteer Coordination, Fundraising and Grant Writing, Marketing, Community Relations, and Social Media. Our new team has been essential to our growth and expansion in the past year.

Thanks to the tireless work of our Leadership Team, Parent Advisor, Wendi Eusebio, and our incredible volunteers, we are honored to have received many different awards this past year. We were awarded the 2022 USPTA Elevate Award, a United States Professional Tennis Association award to an outstanding coach under the age of 30, the 2022 United States Tennis Association (USTA) SoCal Service Award for Adaptive & Wheelchair tennis, and were the recipients of the 2022 Young Philanthropists donation. Earlier this year, we became the first ever youth-led, intellectual and developmental disability-focused National Junior Tennis and Learning (NJTL) chapter in NJTL’s 52 years of existence. We are humbled to receive this distinction and hope to honor the vision that Arthur Ashe created when he started NJTL.

We have also continued our year-round twice monthly tennis clinics in partnership with the Tustin Parks and Recreation Department, and are renewing our contract with them for 2023. This past July, we had a successful, Disney-themed summer camp at the Anaheim Tennis Center (ATC) with our largest ever summer camp turn out. Thanks to our donors, sponsors, and grant funding, we were able to waive all camp fees for our students. Our next camp will be at ATC at the end of December, and our 2023 July summer camp and December winter camp are already calendared with ATC.

We have had many successes off the court as well. The first ever high school Serving Advantage club was established at Corona Del Mar High School by one of our doubles partners. We also have inquiries for program expansion into South County, specifically Newport Beach and Aliso Viejo. We will be hosting our first-ever USTA sanctioned Level 6 Junior Charity Tennis Tournament on April 1st and 2nd, with World Autism Awareness Day falling on April 2. Our hope is to continue sharing our program with the tennis community so we can increase access to the sport for people of all abilities. We will share more details as April gets closer. In addition, Serving Advantage will be hosting a booth at the TACA Sensitive Santa event on December 3rd. We encourage our student families to attend and to stop by our booth, as we will have a fun game and goodies for all participants!

We are so grateful to all of our volunteers, students, leadership team members, donors, sponsors, and our entire Serving Advantage family for all the support. Your continuous support  is greatly appreciated, and vital to our mission of spreading inclusion to our community and beyond.

Have a wonderful holiday season!