Posted on Sun, May. 04, 2008

In 1987, Geoff Norton was a community-college tennis coach in Texas running a group of low-level players through drills at a local park when he saw something that changed his career.

A player showed up in a wheelchair.

“There were nine or 10 able-bodied men out there,” said Norton, who now works at Midtown Tennis Club in Overland Park. “I just froze. I didn’t know what to do. But the drill didn’t change at all. This guy did everything everyone else was doing.

“Run is just push to them.”

Even though he’d never swung a racket from a wheelchair, Norton had found a new calling. This February, after more than 20 years training wheelchair tennis players, Norton became the first able-bodied teaching pro to win the Professional Tennis Registry’s Wheelchair Tennis Professional of the Year award.

“He’s just got a passion for it,” said Dan Santorum, chief executive officer for the tennis registry. “When he started working for us, he just gravitated to (wheelchair tennis). He made himself an expert in it. He’s taught a lot of courses in it and still does.

“It’s special what Geoff’s doing, let’s just put it that way.”

But why wheelchair tennis? Norton has never needed to use a wheelchair. No one close to him had needed to use a wheelchair.

Even before that first teaching encounter with a wheelchair player, Norton attended a clinic at Tyler Community College in Texas that opened his eyes to the sport.

“Randy Snow, who was the No. 1-ranked wheelchair tennis player in the world at the time, visited to do a presentation,” Norton said. “And, he just took it to another level.

“To see that, I was like, ‘Wow!’ I’d known it existed, but I’d never seen it in person.”

Norton became a clinician and tester with the Professional Tennis Registry in 1989 and was instrumental in ensuring that wheelchair tennis was represented in its certification materials, a first for a tennis organization. He also was the first to introduce the sport in Kenya and has conducted symposiums at other parts of the globe.

When Norton joined the United States Tennis Association in 2005, his involvement with wheelchair tennis increased another notch.

“The one thing you see about Jeff is that he’s an ‘I can’ guy,” said Dan James, national manager for wheelchair tennis with the USTA. “He’s always the guy who can get things done and has been a great asset to all of us involved in the sport.

“His passion for wheelchair tennis is incredible.”

In 2006, he coached the U.S. men’s wheelchair tennis national team at the World Team Cup in Brasilia, Brazil, where it won the gold medal. The next year, he was the team leader for Team USA for the Parapan American games in Rio de Janeiro and also coached the U.S. team at a competition in Stockholm.

It’s during those competitive trips where Norton said he’s often learned the most about the wheelchair tennis athlete.

“Traveling is a unique experience,” he said. “We’ve gone to old facilities that were built before they had to be wheelchair accessible, and I’ve literally carried athletes down stairs.

“It’s a very unique group to work with.”

Norton grows very animated when explaining how wheelchair tennis players do what they do, or describing some of the top athletes he’s observed in action. He explained that the sport is divided between quadriplegics, those disabled from the chest down, and paraplegics, from the waist down, and showed how quads have to sometimes tape the racket into their hands just to maintain their grip.

“Sometimes,” he said, “they put another layer of tape on with the sticky side out, so they can push their chair better.”

Late last year, however, Norton started to miss on-court teaching and contacted Ajay Pant, the general manager at Midtown, about working in the Kansas City area.

Pant said he tried to dissuade Norton at first, thinking the move would be a step backward from his work with the USTA. But Norton was persistent, and Pant realized he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to bring such an established teaching talent onto his team.

Norton became director of junior high performance at Midtown Tennis Club in October.

He said it’s only a matter of time before he gets a wheelchair tennis program established in the Kansas City area.

“I was at Wal-Mart the other day, and one of the greeters at the door was in a chair,” Norton said. “I talked to him a bit, and he told me there weren’t many programs in the area.

“I’ll build it up given time. The first thing I’ll probably do is go to rehab facilities, get the word started. St. Louis has a pretty big (professional wheelchair) tournament. The No. 3 quad player in the world, Nick Taylor, lives in Wichita.

“There’s no reason why we can’t have something here.

“Just to know what these people have accomplished and the satisfaction they get out of it … it’s huge.”

To reach Bob Luder, send e-mail to bluder@kcstar.com