JoE’s Story

Joe was born in September 2006 with chronic asthma and had spent his first Christmas in hospital on a ventilator.  For the first few years of Joe’s life, he had to take steroids for his asthma and life wasn’t always easy for him. 

EBAT attended Joe’s school, Dale Hall, in May 2013 when Joe was almost 7.  Joe attended 3 free sessions with EBAT and enjoyed it so much that he started attending some sessions with EBAT on Saturday mornings.

When Joe’s sister started school in September 2014, Joe’s mum changed her hours at work, which meant that Joe was able to attend sessions with EBAT during the week, as well as at weekends.  Joe also started having individual lessons in October 2014.  When Joe started competing at red ball, we realised that he would need to up his game if he wanted to be the best he could be at tennis so his training programme escalated very quickly and in January 2015, Joe was attending 5 sessions per week with EBAT. 

In the early part of 2014, Joe had been taken off his asthma steroids and had lost a massive amount of weight.  Now, in July 2016, Joe is no longer classed as asthmatic and has lost almost 3 stone.  Playing tennis with EBAT and doing lots more exercise has helped Joe, I have no doubt that he would have been an obese child still on steroids if he hadn’t joined EBAT. 

As well as Joe’s health and weight improving, his confidence has soared and he has made some brilliant friends at EBAT.  I recently received Joe’s school report which was excellent and words like ‘attention to detail’, ‘discipline’, ‘gives 100% every lesson’ and ‘very popular student’ shone out of his school report.

Now, almost at the age of 10, Joe loves life, he loves going to school and his love for the tennis court grows every time he trains.