Hopkinton Woman Rallies Boston Lobsters Tennis

Hopkinton's Darlene Hayes went into sports marketing when she got out of Regis College in Weston, moved to an event planner for the United States Tennis Association and now directs development for the Boston Lobsters World Tennis Team.

Wait a minute. Didn't the Lobsters go out of business last century when then-owner Bob Kraft started getting serious about his other team, the New England Patriots?

They did. But the Lobsters have been back for seven years. Hayes has been promoting them and doing pretty much everything behind the scenes for the last four, much of it from her Hopkinton home.

"It's 10-and-a-half months of work for seven nights of entertainment," she said during a recent interview. When you put that much energy into something, you don't want to leave anything on the court when the matches end. Hayes doesn't.

Talk to her a few minutes and you're ready to head up to Middleton's Ferncroft Country Club to catch opening night for the 2011 Boston Lobsters home season on July 5.

Hayes has the quiet confidence and enthusiasm of someone who's got a great story in World Team Tennis.

How about a couple of hours of free QuickStart tennis for kids each night before WTT action starts? Maybe they'll even get to face Larry the Lobster with his six-foot racket. (Is that even fair?) And players who stay after every match 'til every kid gets an autograph.

Hayes uses local 14- to 19-year-old students as interns, prints some tickets on a friend's kitchen table, gets copies from Action Copy in downtown Hopkinton and signs made in Milford.

Whether it's Middleton, Hopkinton or Boston, Darlene wants to involve the community as much as possible. That's part of club owner Bahar Uttam's vision and World Team Tennis founder Billie Jean King's vision too.

King  is an amazing woman, amazing advocate for women's sports and amazing tennis player. 

King - it's ancient history now but was unheard of then - a multiple Grand Slam winner, played and beat Bobby Riggs in a 1973 coed tennis match. She didn't stop there, but used her fame to push for Title 9 (equal funding for women's sports) which has changed the landscape of American athletics.

King founded World TeamTennis, and King's team, the Philadelphia Freedom, is named for the song Elton John wrote for her!

Hayes said King and Elton are still fast friends, with Sir Elton on the board of King's Women's Sports Foundation and King on the AIDS Foundation board.

The good will and giving humanity behind World Team Tennis is played out on the court too, where the Lobsters especially encourage diversity. Hayes says the Boston team is especially fortunate to have top-ranked African-American player James Blake.

Plus there are always coed matches in World Team Tennis, Hayes said. And every team does lots of outreach to urban children to get them involved in tennis.

"Billie's idea is to get kids moving," Hayes said. The "let's play!"attitude carries into two of King's favorite sayings, "No airs in tennis," and "Go be quiet in the parking lot."

Besides the model-handsome Blake, there's sizzling Anna Kournikova who plays for St. Louis; the Lobster's Coco Vandeweghe (Kiki's niece, Olympian's daughter and granddaughter of a former Miss America); most-powerful-serve-in-the-world Mark Philippoussis also in St. Louis; rising star Melanie Oudin in Philly; and a Lobster team that boasts Eric Butorac, Jan-Michael Gambill, Mashona Washington and John Isner.

They are joined at every match by marquee stars of the tennis past (Agassi and Martina Navratilova - a Lobsters team member recovering from breast cancer), present and future (Oudin and Vandeweghe especially). Seeing them at Ferncroft is less than an hour away from Hopkinton.

And seeing them at Ferncroft where the venue holds about 2,000 you are right on top of the action.

The WTT offers group and corporate events and sponsorships and a night of entertainment for a family or individual fan. 

Opening night is July 5 at Ferncroft against New York. Tickets? Visit www.bostonlobsters.net, call 877-617-5627, or look for Darlene on the golf course Monday afternoons when she takes time out to tee it up.

"I'm really a golfer," she said. "But I played a little tennis in high school and I'm taking lessons again now."

CORRECTION: This article was changed on April 27 at 6 p.m. for the following reasons. Martina Navratilova, a member of the Boston Lobsters, is recovering from breast cancer. Billie Jean King is healthy and doesn't play in the WTT. There are also proprietary spellings for World TeamTennis  and QuickStart tennis. Darlene Hayes' Hopkinton address and the place where tickets are printed were also incorrect in the earlier version.