Earlier this month, Up2Us Sports bade a fond farewell to Summer Marketing Intern, Melina Blasetti. Motivated by her own athletic background and the conviction that everyone deserves to experience the joys and benefits of sport, Melina spent the summer as an intern both with Up2Us Sports and Major League Baseball (MLB). Over the last three months, she offered her consulting skills honed over several years with Bain & Company, her own experience of starting and running a nonprofit (while completing high school!), and her unrelenting passion for sports.
As a lifelong athlete, Melina knows that sports can be a source of both joy and profound personal growth in a young person’s life. She devoted herself to competitive tennis in high school, completing a partial home-school program so that she could practice for six hours each day. Those long days on the court “taught me a lot of valuable lessons: discipline, hard work, how to compete and better yourself and come out from behind in matches.”
When an injury halted her training, Melina became stressed and restless, wondering how to carry on. It was then that she began to consider how many other youth were sidelined from tennis—not due to injury, but to lack of access. Between pay-to-play programs, lessons, and equipment, tennis is one of the more prohibitively expensive sports; many simply don’t have access to courts and equipment. Melina decided she would start a nonprofit in her home city of Atlanta, with the intention of getting the most essential piece of gear into the hands of as many interested kids as possible. She called it Rackets For All.
Rackets For All training event.
“Ask for what you want. The worst case is that people tell you ‘No.’ But most of the time people are receptive.”
“I started collecting extra rackets from friends that I trained with. They would get new rackets and have five old ones [sitting] in their garages.” Then she would donate the rackets to kids participating in Boys and Girls Clubs, and hold training events where she and a few other teammates would teach the kids tennis skills and technique.
With some logistical guidance from her parents, Melina began to expand Rackets For All. In addition to appealing to friends and training mates for rackets, she pitched a partnership to PGA TOUR Superstore. “I said, ‘Hey, can you put a donation bucket in all of your local stores with a one-pager of what Rackets For All is trying to do?’” She also suggested petitioning customers to donate their old rackets when they came in to buy new ones—and PGA TOUR agreed. “I ended up collecting through that partnership—they had six stores in the metro Atlanta area—about 2,000 rackets. A lot of them were brand new or barely used.” The partnership evolved further: if Rackets For All received a racket in bad condition, PGA TOUR would refurbish it free of charge.
Soon Melina began running donation and training events to continue raising awareness for her cause. She reached out to her church and tennis academy communities in search of connections to Atlanta-based companies, and was able to secure some sponsorships. She also found events where she could market Rackets For All. She attended what was then known as the BB&T Open (now the Atlanta Open)—an Atlanta pro-tennis tournament—set up a booth, and spread the word. “It was a lot of grassroots [activity], trying to get the name out there, trying to get the rackets, finding companies to sponsor the other costs.”
Melina recruited a few friends from her tennis academy to help provide coaching and tennis instruction at different events. She even reached out to some of the rising tennis stars of the time, such as Donald Young and John Isner, who agreed to come coach some events in collaborations with Rackets For All.
It was an impressive undertaking for a high school student, and Melina regrets that she was unable to sustain it when she started college. Yet her early foray into sports-based nonprofit work taught her some valuable lessons: “Ask for what you want. The worst case is that people tell you ‘No.’ But most of the time people are receptive.”
Melina (back center) with student participants at a Rackets for All training event.
“[Doing] something with a similar mission to Up2Us Sports, long-term, I think would be a dream—to use [my] skills from consulting, and the knowledge and connections I got through working in sports [in order] to make an impact on people.”
She also learned that giving back to her community through sports felt good: it had been a profoundly meaningful and fulfilling experience. Now working towards her MBA at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Melina is shaping a career path that she hopes will balance practical necessities with passion. And she has continued to follow her love of sports wherever it takes her. This led her to adopt an intense training regimen in preparation for a boxing match fundraiser for the Boys and Girls Club, join a Rec League softball team to complement her internship with MLB, and to offer her time to Up2Us Sports as a summer intern.
Up2Us Sports’ Marketing team received Melina with open arms: “They said, ‘Tell us what you want to work on, let us know what you want exposure to and we’ll try to make it happen.’ I really wanted to get back into the stuff I had learned [with Rackets For All]. So I helped with putting together a sponsorship deck to recruit sponsors for the upcoming gala. I reached out to [my] connections and solicited donations for the auction.” She also honed her sales and communication skills, learning how to speak persuasively about “a mission that personally resonates with me but might require a bit more ‘selling’ for others.”
Inspired by the Up2Us Sports team’s commitment to sports-based youth development, Melina’s internship experience seems to have planted a seed: “[Doing] something with a similar mission to Up2Us Sports, long-term, I think would be a dream—to use [my] skills from consulting, and the knowledge and connections I got through working in sports [in order] to make an impact on people.” In a short period of time, Melina’s dedicated service, creativity, and authentic connection to the cause have made a lasting impact on Up2Us Sports.
