Last year, Sam Jalloh zig-zagged across west Africa coaching tennis to kids, taking with him rackets, balls and a cellphone loaded with photographs and videos of a professional player in action to inspire the youngsters.
The player was Frances Tiafoe.
That move to encourage young Africans by showing them images of Tiafoe, an American with Sierra Leone roots, has paid off. Jalloh’s phone has pinged and pinged this week with text messages from many of the kids, delighted by the 24-year-old Tiafoe’s incredible run to the semi-finals at the US Open, where he beat Rafael Nadal along the way.
Photo: AP
“They’re saying: ‘coach, have you seen Frances? This is really good.’ When these things happen ... you can see that it motivates children,” Jalloh said. “They are very, very excited and it’s not just kids from Sierra Leone. I’ve got kids from Gambia, kids from Ghana, kids from Nigeria. This will bring a lot more inspiration for them.”
Tiafoe was born in the US to parents who emigrated from Sierra Leone — also Jalloh’s home country — and while Tiafoe offers new hope for the future of American tennis, the African link made him an ideal role model for Jalloh to use, even before this breakthrough US Open where he advanced to Friday’s semi-finals before losing 6-7 (6/8), 6-3, 6-1, 6-7 (5/7), 6-3 to Carlos Alcaraz.
Tiafoe’s parents, Frances Sr and Alphina, struggled when they first arrived in the US. Frances Sr worked as a laborer and then janitor at the Junior Tennis Champions Center in Maryland. Alphina put in long night shifts as a nurse. Frances Jr and his twin brother, Franklin, were born in Maryland and lived for much of the first 10 years of their lives in a converted office at the tennis center.
Photo: AFP
With that backstory, Jalloh could see kids in west Africa make “a connection” to Tiafoe even though he also showed them clips of 22-time Grand Slam singles champion Nadal and other top players.
“It inspires them to go on and be great in tennis or whatever they aspire to be,” Jalloh said.
He said that the Tiafoe effect in Africa would “go on for a long time.”
Jalloh said that tennis is more popular than many think in west Africa.
He has seen enough courts in enough towns and cities, and enough young hopefuls to make that claim.
Some of the courts he has coached on are neatly marked out and surrounded by fences, but many are not. Jalloh has made use of whatever he has found. Some are little more than cracked strips of concrete in between houses in poor, inner-city neighborhoods. Others are stretches of flat earth carved out of the wilderness outside town.
It is here that Jalloh hopes Tiafoe Jr’s stirring performance at Flushing Meadows sparks something in tennis authorities in west Africa like it has in his young players.
“Once we have the organization and the people with the passion, then you’ll see a lot of talent come from Africa,” Jalloh said.
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