Rob Balge, who retired in May as the tennis instructor at Bowling Green Parks and Recreation, stands on one of the tennis courts at Kereiakes Park with his racquet on Thursday morning, July 25, 2024. (Grace Ramey McDowell/grace.ramey@bgdailynews.com)

Rob Balge’s first retirement may have been a loss to the world of advertising, but it was certainly a major gain for the area tennis scene.

Now Balge is enjoying his “second retirement” after stepping down from his role as a lead tennis instructor with the Bowling Green Parks and Recreation Department – a position that allowed Balge to influence a generation of up-and-coming tennis talent in southcentral Kentucky.

Balge, who retired from BGPRD in May at age 65, had settled in Bowling Green in 2013 and retired from his advertising agency two years later.

“I thought I better get a part-time job, keep myself off the street and help make Bowling Green a better place to live, work and play,” Balge said.

That goal eventually led Balge to BGPRD and a regular presence on the tennis courts at Kereiakes Park, where he began to teach players young and old alike how to play the game.

“It mainly started with getting a kid to hit the ball over the net,” Balge said. “I told most parents and most kids, if you listen you’ll be hitting the ball over the net in five minutes. Everybody doubted me, but they found out very quickly if they listened they could hit the ball over the net. So that’s pretty much how it started.”

Balge, a Milwaukee native, was a bit of late bloomer to tennis. Baseball was his game growing up, and Balge was good – he played third base at the collegiate level for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. After college, Balge embarked on a career in radio advertising and soon learned the benefits of spending extra time with clients. Most of his contemporaries played golf for that purpose, but Balge found a round on the course simply took too long.

Tennis, on the other hand … Balge could see the potential in that game for relationship-building with a bit more of a brisk pace, so he started learning how to play.

“It’s basically all the same movements as baseball,” Balge said. “Hitting a tennis ball is basically the same motion, same movement as hitting a baseball.”

But what began as a career-boosting tool soon became a lifelong passion for Balge.

“If you like the sport, you’ll want to play as much as you can,” Balge said. “It got in my blood and I was pretty much playing seven days a week. I couldn’t get enough of it and I did that until I was in my late 40s, early 50s.”

As a tennis instructor with Bowling Green Parks and Rec, Balge attempted to pass that same love of the game along to his students. It was a modest beginning when he took over a faltering program struggling to generate much interest in 2015.

“In the beginning, we were lucky to have between 25 to 50 kids over a two-week span,” Balge said. “Now what we were probably doing was 80 to 100 kids and adults over a three-week span. Initially when I came on we did an eight-week program – it was four two-week programs. Now since then we’ve gone from that eight-week program to seven months and we do a camp three weeks a month – or they do it, now.”

Balge’s goal was to teach fundamentals, with fun being a key component in his lessons. Interactive games with names like s’mores and popcorn livened up those lessons even more.

“Everything was interactive,” Balge said. “My idea was to get a kid to hit the ball off the bounce. I would encourage kids that if you don’t hit it on the first bounce, it’ll bounce again – hit it. And that way they can learn to hit the ball over the net off the bounce.”

“ … My motto was turn, set, step, swing.”

Many of the current crop of high school players in the region can trace some of their earliest introduction to tennis back to Balge’s lessons. He has stepped down from that role, but his impact remains, according to BGPRD Sports and Wellness Manager Pete Samios.

“The program’s still going on, it’s still doing well, it just doesn’t have quite the number of participants that we had when we had Rob,” Samios said. “Everybody knew Rob, loves Rob – he did a terrific job of recruiting and training kids, teaching them the game of tennis.”

Balge, who also oversaw volleyball and futsal for the BGPRD during the winter months, is ready to focus a bit more on his own tennis game now that he’s retired once again. His USTA team won the state tournament last year and Balge will play in the sectionals in Alabama in September, but otherwise plans to stay local and play matches around town with friends.

His lessons may be over, but Balge’s legacy remains in the southcentral Kentucky tennis community.

“I take a lot of pride in it,” Balge said. “I didn’t realize what kind of impact it had until some coaches would come up from schools and things like that. I wasn’t thinking about that, I wasn’t even worried about any kind of an impact other than the fact that every kid, I want them to learn and enjoy tennis. And every adult that I worked with, I want them to learn and enjoy tennis like I did.”{&end}