Doris Obih has spent much of the past five years injecting a renewed vitality into the sport of tennis in the city of Inglewood, Calif., and on Monday night at the 2020 US Open, some of the fruits from her hard work will be on full display for an international audience.

As a part of this year’s virtual Opening Night festivities, Grammy Award-nominated singer and songwriter Andra Day will perform two songs, including her hit single, “Rise Up,” in a performance at Edward Vincent Jr. Park, known within the local community as the home courts of Obih’s 40 Love Foundation.

Having learned to play tennis from a similar non-profit as a child beginning at age 7, Obih, now 30, founded 40 Love in 2016 at the suggestion of a friend, having been looking for an opportunity to replicate her own youth experience and help kids get into the game in and around the area where she was raised. In partnership with city officials and the USTA Foundation, Obih has grown 40 Love, a part of the National Junior Tennis and Learning (NJTL) network, into an organization that provides 200 under-resourced children with tennis and academic resources annually.

“We definitely use tennis as a vessel for the kids in the community,” she told USOpen.org in an interview late last week. “We do the educational side of tutoring and homework help, and we try to bridge the gap between the Inglewood school district and other school districts around the area. We just want to make sure that our kids are successful.”

A passionate advocate for the youth in her community, much of the work of Obih’s foundation is dedicated to young people, but 40 Love also recently helped complete a project that has impacted all of Inglewood. Thanks in part to Obih’s passion and the city’s fundraising efforts, the tennis courts at Edward Vincent Jr. Park, one of five local parks in which 40 Love offers its programming, underwent their first refurbishment in a quarter-century last year.

Projects such as this, in addition to assisting in other local events, including the inaugural Inglewood City of Champions 5K, are just some of the ways in which Obih’s foundation has touched Inglewood in the short time since its founding, and her diligence has earned her the support of city officials spanning all the way up to Mayor James T. Butts.

“They gave us a chance,” she said. “With everything we’ve brought to the courts… I think the mayor and the councilmen saw that we were so dedicated to doing things for the kids in the community.

“They just saw that I wanted to help the community and help the kids. They’ve been open to anything that we need: when it comes to having access to the courts, when it comes to transportation [for] kids to come to the parks or the programming, when it comes to
education… They’re clearing out all the roadblocks that we see can happen with this program, and we’re able to make things happen.”

While already building a network in her own community, Obih has also expanded 40 Love’s horizons and used the resources available to her through the USTA Foundation to help her chapter grow. By participating in the NJTL Capacity Building Program, an organizational development course offered by the USTA Foundation to help chapter leaders build meaningful organizations for the long-term, Obih has had the opportunity to connect with other diverse NJTL leaders from around the country and take lessons from them back to Inglewood.

“The USTA Foundation is a pivotal partnership for us. When I got in contact with the USTA… I was still learning a lot of things. I realized that [doing] things, physically, whether that’s the tennis side of things or educational side of things, that was a piece of cake,” she said.

“They basically broke it down for us, and gave us the foundation of what needs to be done, from dotting your i’s to crossing your t’s. That has been the biggest thing for us. The financial support has been great, too, because [the USTA Foundation] was one of the first large, lump-sum grants that we got.

“Via phone and email, I have been introduced to a lot of NJTL leaders… who’ve been women. They have been great advisers. They’ve been raw, and that’s what I asked for. I love for people to tell me, straight up, ‘These are the problems you’ll have,’ ‘This doesn’t sound right,’ ‘This doesn’t feel sustainable.’ They’ve been those types of voices for me. Having those types of mentors and advice in my ear, it’s been absolutely amazing.”

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Obih’s short-term goals for 40 Love include ensuring that programming can continue safely by implementing all new safety measures and protocols, hiring staff to accommodate the flow of participants and providing education to that staff on following guidelines. In the long term, she hopes to continue to raise the profile of the sport in the area.

“I want tennis in Inglewood to be a prime sport… alongside basketball, football or any other sport. I want us to be a diamond in the rough,” she said. “I want people to start know about 40 Love, but not about us—about the kids and the work that we do. We’re not here just to be here. We’re actually impacting these kids in any way that we can.

“40 Love is near and dear to my heart because I’m a big advocate for the youth. A lot of times, the youth don’t have a voice, and to have a program to be able to be the voice for those kids and everything that they do… I’m just trying to have a place where kids can be themselves, talk amongst themselves, be kids and know that they can grow into anything and anyone they want to be.

“That is why I do what I do. My progress and my success is seeing one of these kids in 10 years, saying, ’40 Love is why I am the person I am today,’ in a positive way.”

– Victoria Chiesa