A “borne” winner, Christie Borne is in top form as a USPTA Professional who has been designing USPTA Little Tennis programs for kids ages 4-11 for the last 17 years. She structured these lessons to create a passion for tennis and build character, self-esteem, patience, and self-control in the life of the player.

When Christie grew up in Belding, Mich., the cement tennis court at Washington Elementary School was the only court in her little farming town. It was off-limits to kids out for recess. No one played there, and why would they? Her high school didn’t have a team.

But with some instruction from her stepfather in the gymnasium during her junior year of high school, Christie caught the craze for tennis. During the cold Michigan winters in the 1960s, wearing mittens and boots, Christie spent hours hitting ball after ball on the wall of that old elementary school. After all these years her passion still remains!

As the wife of a missionary pilot and mother of four children, Christie taught village women biblical principles of marriage in the jungles of East Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia, and played on tennis leagues and in tournaments with Chinese, Indonesians and expatriates for 11 years. Today she continues playing singles tournaments, kickboxing, and rollerblading.

Upon returning from the jungle in 1991, Christie began her teaching career in Fort Worth, Texas, on cracked asphalt neighborhood courts, giving tennis lessons to 5-year-olds and performing puppet shows on the tennis court about self-control, patience, and integrity to encourage tennis interest and character development.

Christie, who subsequently joined the USPTA in Colorado in 1996, started up high- quality, grassroots, family tennis programs, including USPTA Little Tennis, and conducted tennis carnivals to draw kids to tennis and pique adult interest in programs in Colorado as well as Texas.

Her tennis games for kids have been published in ADDvantage magazine, and she was the USPTA Industry Excellence Award runner-up in 1997. As a USA School Tennis coordinator in Colorado in 2000, she trained and supervised five new clinicians who were preparing to conduct training for physical-education teachers teaching tennis, and led 100 tennis assemblies and seven in-service workshops on the elementary through high school levels.

Micro Tennis League, a nontraditional form of competitive singles play for kids not yet serving and scoring, has been a successful program of Christie’s since 1997, when first implemented in Littleton, Colo., by Mark Chomko. She now teaches Micro Tennis indoors at the YMCA Cypress Creek on taped-off short courts.

This USPTA Pro 2 is also creator of “Call T’ Court’’ – tennis in your neighborhood cul-de-sac – and “Survive the Heat” summer tennis camps, an out-of-the-ordinary camp challenge.

Recently certified as a USPTA wheelchair professional, she introduces herself to people in chairs in Wal-Mart, Starbucks, malls, airports and anywhere she is traveling to encourage them to embrace tennis. She has a sincere love for people and a deep interest in their growth and development as players.

Christie currently is teaching private and semiprivate lessons on subdivision courts in Villages of Northpointe in Tomball, Texas, directing Survive the Heat Summer Tennis camps at the Met Family Fitness Center in Cypress, Texas, and implementing Micro Tennis at the YMCA.