In just three short years, San Diego’s famous taco truck owner and former underground party promoter Antonio Ley – or el Tony Tee as he’s known to his friends – has embraced the sport of tennis like a newborn Christian takes to his new religion.

It’s because the sport of tennis, Ley says, helped save his life. 

At age 41, Ley was diagnosed with diabetic ketoacidosis, and he was told he needed to watch his weight. Find a sport you can enjoy and start exercising, his doctor told him. 

“I wanted my daughter to see her dad doing something active and living a healthier lifestyle,” said Ley, who recently turned 44. 

But when Ley started hanging around the public parks in the South Bay area of Chula Vista, and ventured farther north and visited some tennis clubs in San Diego, he said what he found was a sport that had little to no representation from the Latino community where he was raised. Ley said tennis where he lived had an “an accessibility problem.”

So Ley founded Club Raquetas, a cross-border athletic and social club with the goal to grow the sport of tennis in the South Bay region of San Diego, particularly within the Mexican American community.

Ley said his goal was to break the stereotype that tennis is an elitist sport played only in the richest Southern California communities. The club offers weekly group classes for adults, private lessons, and a youth program that provides free classes for kids. Additionally, Club Raquetas holds fiestas and tennis events in the park to celebrate the South Bay community with music, food, and tennis.

Now Ley spends 10 hours a week on the court teaching tennis to hundreds who would have otherwise been exposed to it. Ley even started a popular women’s only clinic on Monday evenings at Chula Vista’s Terra Nova Park. 

“I’m not a tennis coach, but tennis has changed my life,” he said.

Ley continued, “I have people who cross the border to take part in my tennis classes. We’re very community oriented. We’re a niche. We needed to exist and the reason we did it was because there wasn’t a place for us. There wasn’t a Mexican American tennis club in the South Bay where we live.”

Now Club Raquetas is a thriving business and an LLC. “We started with five people, and now we have 50 playing at a time,” Ley said. “All of our classes are in Spanish. It’s been very easy to grow because there was a vacancy. We found that if you give it to them in their language, they react.”

Ley will be a guest speaker at this Saturday’s (Sept. 21) Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month event taking place from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the campus of Cal-State Los Angeles (5151 State University Dr., L.A., 90033). The event is free and open to all and there will be tennis games, a kid’s zone, music, food, prizes, LA Dodgers swag and other inspiring speakers. 

The celebration is hosted by the USTA Southern California section and is organized by USTA SoCal Director of Community Tennis & DEI Esther Avila-Hendershott. 

Ley said he would love nothing more than to produce a Chicanx Wimbledon or US Open champion, but he knows that is not the main goal of Club Raquetas. The goal is to make the game of tennis accessible to all. 

“I’m hooked on the game of tennis,” Ley said. “I go to pro tournaments, college, high school matches. I’m watching it all the time. I love it.”

For more information, go to: www.clubraquetas.com.

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USTA Southern California will be hosting a Hispanic Heritage Month celebration at Cal State LA on September 21st from 10am-1pm. The event is free and open to the public. Click here to register for the event!