Tennis team members join 425 students, friends on mission trips during spring break

Janel Shoun | 

For most college athletic teams, spring break usually means the same old training on a quiet campus or, at best, heading to a tournament at a sunny destination. But for six members of the Lipscomb University tennis teams this year, Spring Break will bring sun and surf in one of the poorest nations in the world: Haiti.

The tennis team members are six of 425 Lipscomb-related servants devoting their one week off from school (or work) to help the poor and hurting in 22 locations throughout the Western Hemisphere, from England to El Salvador and across the U.S. The trips are largely coordinated and carried out by students, some of whom spend up to a year in advance working out the logistics.

While the tennis team will be teaching tennis skills to Haitian school children and tutoring students in the local high schools, other Lipscomb students will be building homes in Appalachia, encouraging orphans in Mexico, ministering to spring break partiers in Florida and coordinating medical clinics in Guatemala and Honduras.

Lipscomb’s mission tradition has grown steadily each year for the past decade, but this is the first year that a Lipscomb athletic team has fielded its own mission trip. Lynn Griffith, coach of the tennis teams, has visited Cap Haitian, the second-largest city in Haiti, 10 times since 2002. On his previous trips, he met some native Haitians working to teach children tennis.

The Haitian coaches face some big challenges as the entire city has only two tennis courts and they are short on usable equipment. Lipscomb’s mission team will bring a stock of new equipment for the Haitian coaches and conduct a tennis camp for interested children.

“I feel that education is the key to changing a country, so I strive to bring about change through knowledge,” said Griffith, who has previously led teams to Cap Haitian from Hillsboro Church of Christ in Nashville. “I often see an adult (in Haiti) who has given up hope, so I feel that through teaching the kids a sport, particularly a lifetime sport, it helps them build self-esteem and boost their life worth.”

A new destination for Lipscomb this year is the island of Statia, a Caribbean island in the West Indies. Lipscomb has launched a mission trip to a neighboring island called Saba for several years. A high school principal on Statia heard about the good work of the students and contacted Lipscomb to request that a team come there as well, said Christin Shatzer, Lipscomb staff and coordinator of the team.

While in Statia, the team will mentor local high school students, conduct service projects in the community to encourage students to take ownership of their community, and provide support for families through devotionals, performances and game and activity nights.

Other locations for Lipscomb’s spring break missions trips include the Atlanta and New York City inner cities; Jamaica; Baja, Calif.; several small cities in England; Miami; Panama City, Fla.; Mexico; Guatemala; Honduras; and El Salvador.

Mission teams will be doing everything from working with a Boys and Girls Club and conducting a VBS to manual labor projects for Habitat for Humanity and providing food and medical supplies, plus many more tasks all the while outreaching and evangelizing.

Lipscomb has sponsored mission trips worldwide for many years, but in 2002 the university centralized coordination of student trips through its missions program. Today more than 40 trips are sponsored each year in the spring and summer. The teams have their own meeting room and resource center on campus, and hundreds of alumni, Lipscomb faculty and staff, and Christians from the community join the students each year on the various trips.

“As Lipscomb has become more mission-minded, I think the coaches have seen the need to do this,” said Griffith. “As our society begins to understand how blessed we are in the U.S., we begin to see the needs of other countries around the world, and I think you will see more and more teams doing this.”

Next on tap for Lipscomb: the women’s volleyball team is planning to take an international mission trip to Brazil in May 2009, said Coach Brandon Rosenthal. The tennis and volleyball teams are part of a small but growing trend in collegiate athletics, he said.

“There are a lot of teams who have started including service learning in their teamwork,” he said. “It doesn’t get a lot of press, but I think it is the future direction of college athletics. We’re really just trying to encompass the Lipscomb University mission and take it one step further.”