Reviving Tradition with Jeffrey Goodman

Summary

Jeffrey Goodman — Lisa Stone’s younger brother, Division III college player, filmmaker, and Shreveport tennis community organizer — discusses his effort to revive the Shreveport City Championships, a historic local tennis tournament that began in the 1930s and went dormant approximately a decade before this recording. The conversation covers Jeffrey’s own late-blooming tennis development (rebuilt into a defense-first style at age 18 by a coach who was the first person to teach him how to win), his experience building a free weekly group play session in Shreveport, and the broader cultural role that the City Championships played as the annual gathering point for the entire local tennis community — juniors competing against adults, multiple age groups overlapping, and a week-long festival atmosphere at Corby’s Tennis Center. The episode is a meditation on tennis community infrastructure, how it dies, and what it takes to revive it.

Guest Background

Jeffrey Goodman is Lisa Stone’s younger brother, based in Shreveport, Louisiana. He started tennis around ages four to six with his father, played juniors through age 18s, made the Division III team at Washington University in St. Louis (number three singles, second team all-conference), and then spent a decade in Los Angeles pursuing a film career. He returned to Shreveport in 2005, began teaching tennis, organized a long-running free weekly group play session at Corby’s Tennis Center, and raised funding to produce a feature film that achieved significant international festival acclaim. He is co-organizing the 2018 revival of the Shreveport City Championships alongside Todd Killen (director of tennis at Bossier Tennis Center) and Rick Holland (community tennis figure from the area’s active mixed-team era in the 1980s).

Key Findings

1. Late Specialization and Honest Assessment Unlocked Late-Blooming Talent

Jeffrey was not a strong junior player until a coach at age 18 conducted a frank talent audit: “You’re small, you’re done growing, your serve is terrible, you don’t know how to volley, you have no overhead. But you’re really fast, you’re very fit, and you have fairly solid ground strokes.” Rather than trying to develop weaknesses, the coach built an entire game around defense and consistency — teaching him to win through attrition. Jeffrey immediately accepted the approach: “It’s going to be boring. They’re going to call you a pusher. But if you want a game that’s going to allow you to win a lot — I’m in.” The results came quickly, and he played number three at WashU and won second team all-conference.

2. A Single Comment Can Permanently Reshape a Player’s Self-Image

While playing doubles in Los Angeles with Dr. Alan Roberts, Jeffrey ran down a ball at the last possible moment. Roberts said: “Jeffrey — I’ve been playing tennis all my life, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a faster person on a tennis court.” Jeffrey describes this as one of “10 to 20 things in my life that someone has said to me that completely transformed the way I viewed myself.” From that moment, he felt “superhuman fast on a tennis court.” For coaches and players interacting with juniors, the implication is significant: casual comments land permanently, and the ones that identify genuine strengths are catalysts.

3. The City Tournament Was the Annual Barometer for Area Tennis Health

The Shreveport City Championships historically ran for a full week and included every age and gender division — 10s through open men and women, singles and doubles, father-son, mother-daughter, mixed — at Corby’s Tennis Center (public courts at $2.25/hour). Jeffrey describes it as “the single most comfortable place for you to be in the world for that particular week” for anyone who loved tennis, because “all you were around were like-minded people with the exact same passion and interest you had.” It was also the annual moment where top juniors competed directly against top adults — cross-generational play that created folklore and tested aspirations publicly.

4. Free Weekly Group Play Built Lasting Community Across Levels

Jeffrey’s free weekly group at Corby’s — inspired by a 50-70 person drop-in group he discovered in Burbank, California — has run for six to seven years at the time of recording. He texts the top 50 players in the city, gives a time and place, and tracks who’s coming. No charge. Cross-level, cross-age. Jeffrey describes it as continuous: “I still don’t charge, absolutely.” This no-cost, low-friction community infrastructure has been both a social adhesive and the precursor to his interest in reviving the City Championships.

5. Tournaments Die When Keepers of Institutional Knowledge Disengage

The City Championships went dormant because the people who understood its significance “weren’t as involved” and “new pros came in that didn’t grow up in the area, so didn’t have the background, didn’t have the connection to it.” Jeffrey is explicit: “To keep these things going the way they really need to go, it takes real commitment — it takes people doing real work to hustle and to promote and keep it alive.” The institutional knowledge of why something matters cannot be assumed; it must be actively transmitted and held by people with both the history and the energy to act on it.

6. The Venue and the Tournament Are Siblings — One Without the Other Is Incomplete

Jeffrey makes the Churchill Downs/Kentucky Derby analogy: “If you had Churchill Downs but the Kentucky Derby wasn’t around anymore, something would feel a bit off — or if you had the Kentucky Derby but you didn’t have Churchill Downs, it would just feel a little less satisfying.” Corby’s Tennis Center (the historic public facility) and the City Championships are in this relationship. The 2018 revival is happening at Bossier Tennis Center because Corby’s is in physical disrepair — and Jeffrey acknowledges it will “still feel a little different” without its home venue.

7. Cross-Generational Play Was the Tournament’s Defining Character

One of the big draws of the City Championships was that the best juniors competed directly against established adult players — “young versus old, up-and-comer versus established.” Players could enter multiple age divisions: a junior might play 14s, 16s, and 18s; an adult might enter 35s, 40s, and 45s, plus doubles. (USTA no longer allows multi-age-group entry in its events, which Jeffrey notes as a loss.) The result was competitive folklore: you’d hear all year about how good a junior was becoming, but “here they had to come do it in front of a hometown crowd, in front of their people, and do it against people who were 10, 15, 20 years their senior.”

Actionable Advice for Families

• Seek out coaches who will assess a player’s true strengths and limitations honestly, and build a game style around what actually works — not what theoretically should work
• If your junior player is not developing well under a general framework, consider a game identity-first coach who can design a system around the player’s specific physical gifts
• Look for free or low-cost weekly group play sessions in your community as a developmental and social supplement to structured practice; if none exist, consider organizing one
• Recognize that local city and community tournaments provide a developmental context that national ranking events do not — cross-generational, low-stakes competitive exposure is formative
• The stories coaches and mentors tell players about their physical gifts or speed or court sense often become self-fulfilling; choose words carefully and frame strengths explicitly

INTENNSE Relevance

• Community tournament as infrastructure: The Shreveport City Championships is a small-scale version of what INTENNSE is trying to build at a professional level — an annual gathering point for a community of tennis people, cross-generational and cross-level, with a festival atmosphere. INTENNSE’s home matches should aspire to that social totality, not just ticket sales
• Cross-generational play validation: The City Championships’ multi-age competition — juniors against established adults — reinforces the developmental and community value that INTENNSE’s mixed-gender, mixed-level format philosophy embeds at the professional level
• Venue-event symbiosis: Jeffrey’s analogy (Churchill Downs/Kentucky Derby) is directly applicable to INTENNSE’s team-venue relationship. Each team’s home venue is not just a facility — it is the identity anchor. Losing or degrading the venue damages the tournament, and vice versa
• Institutional knowledge preservation: INTENNSE will need deliberate systems to transmit its founding culture, format rationale, and community relationships across coaching and staff turnover. Jeffrey’s story of tournament death-by-disconnection is a cautionary tale
• Coach as community builder: Jeffrey’s free weekly group play — and his instinct to bring juniors and adults together, top 50 players in the city, no charge — mirrors the community-building role INTENNSE coaches can play beyond match day. A coach who organizes open court sessions builds local loyalty in ways that broadcast can’t reach
• Broadcast and storytelling potential: Jeffrey’s film career, Lisa’s media background, and the folkloric quality of the City Championships (“hearsay, folklore, but here they had to come do it in front of a hometown crowd”) underscore that great competitive stories need great storytellers. INTENNSE’s broadcast strategy should invest in narrative infrastructure, not just match production

Notable Quotes

“You’re small, you’re done growing, your serve is terrible, you don’t know how to volley, you have no overhead. But you’re really fast, you’re very fit, and you have fairly solid ground strokes — I’m going to teach you how to play.” — Jeffrey Goodman (recalling his coach’s assessment at age 18)

“I’ve been playing tennis all my life, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a faster person on a tennis court.” — Dr. Alan Roberts (a comment that permanently transformed Jeffrey’s self-image)

“It was probably the single most comfortable place for you to be in the world for that particular week — because all you were around were like-minded people with the exact same passion and interest you had.” — Jeffrey Goodman (on the Shreveport City Championships)

“To keep these things going the way they really need to go, it takes real commitment — it takes people doing real work to hustle and to promote and keep it alive.” — Jeffrey Goodman