Jean Manfredi, LPO, is director of marketing at Manfredi O&P Affiliates, in Long Branch, N.J. She has hosted two of OPAF's First Volley tennis clinics, which bring tennis instruction and play to amputees and others with physical challenges.

1) How do you find people to participate in the First Volley clinics you host?
We invite all of our patients, all rehab facilities, doctor’s offices and physical therapists in the counties that we have offices in, and then [whoever is in] our database. We get day passes for people who are living full-time in the rehab facilities. I usually start about two months in advance, [but] I’d like to do it further [out].

I got a local community college to donate the gym space, so it doesn’t cost [OPAF] or us anything. The college is going to help us promote it this year, so we should be able to entice a lot more people. The biggest challenge is getting the word out.

We’ve had a great response [though]—we’ve had about a dozen people each year. Some people had played tennis when they were younger and never thought they’d get back to it, and some people had never tried hitting a tennis ball, and thought it was the greatest thing.

2) What results have you seen in your patients from attending the events?
You can see your patients build confidence, and see that they can set and achieve goals they never thought possible.

After they’ve had an amputation, they think everything is over. All they’re thinking is, “I want to take care of myself, to take care of my family, to go to the grocery store.” They never for a minute think, “I want to be able to hit tennis balls and maintain balance.” When they do that, a light bulb goes on and they say, “Look what I can do!”

We have a gentleman who, after attending this, felt confident to go out on the school playground with his children and hit a tennis ball. It’s one of those things he can do, as an amputee, with his children, and get outside and be physical.

The goal for us is always to show our patients how they can use tennis, or any recreational activity, as a means of rehabilitation. It doesn’t always have to be in a PT’s gym.

3) How do the instructors work with participants of differing abilities at the same time?
They’ve organized it pretty nicely. You don’t want too large of a group, actually, so [instructors] can work with three or four patients at the same time, and they divvy patients up by what their ability is and what they need. The therapists [that we invite] help the patients who need a little bit more help with balance and [with] how to position themselves to be able to swing a tennis racket and stay upright.

But the key to it is the volunteers. We have lots of volunteers. We have the event at a local community
college, so the women’s tennis team from the college volunteers its time to chase balls and help with the program.

There are a couple of tennis pros who are actually serving balls. The rest of the time all the patients are hitting, and the balls are going every direction, and the volunteers are running and collecting the balls.

4) What happens at a clinic?
I find that it really helps to get physical therapists and occupational therapists involved. We went through a one-hour program with the therapists first on how to show [participants] to use a tennis racket and still maintain their balance and their stance, [before] the patients came to join us.

Then the patients learn how to volley, just simply hitting the ball back and forth, and after they’ve done that for a while and feel confident, then we remove the instructors from the mix and pair up the
participants so they can volley amongst themselves. Then they start going with four people.

It’s just amazing to see the transformation in an hour [or] two—people walk in with canes and leave them on their chairs with their coats, and go out onto the court and don’t even remember that they’re wearing prostheses. When they pick up their coats to walk out, they pick up their canes, and they [think], “Wait a minute, I didn’t need it out there.”

5) What has hosting these clinics done for your business?
Beyond any marketing strategy, it empowers our patients who participate in these programs. It makes them very happy and very positive. They go out and talk to other peer groups and support groups, and the word just travels. It’s really the positive attitude of our patients that helps our company.

They can’t say enough about us, because we fulfill a need for them; we’re not just prosthetists to them. We physically get out there and we show them how to get on with their lives, and that just transcends anything that any newspaper could do.

Our whole goal is to use recreation for rehabilitation. OPAF is just wonderful with all the programs that it does. It empowers [participants] to move on and make other plans, and their plans are not revolving around a therapy department. I’ve got a lot of guys who want to go fishing, and a group of women who want to go shopping. So OPAF is helping people move forward. It’s about the total person.

For more information on how to host a clinic at your facility, contact OPAF’s executive director, Robin Burton, at (215) 752-5756 or rlb@opfund.org.

Interview by Heather Benjamin, assistant editor of the O&P Almanac.