From the Court to the Community: How Max Shilt Is Giving Tennis Balls a Second Life

Walk into any tennis academy and somewhere on the courts there is a fresh can being cracked open. Come back a few months later and those same balls will be gone — not broken, nothing wrong with them really, just no longer good enough, so out they go.

Max Shilt grew up playing competitively at academies around Miami and watched this happen constantly. When he finally asked his coach where all those balls went, the answer stayed with him. Every single one of them went in the trash.

Above: Max Shilt at the Penny Sugarman Tennis Center at Sans Souci in North Miami, training with his high school team, the Alonzo and Tracy Mourning Senior High School Sharks.

Over 125 million tennis balls end up in U.S. landfills every year, generating 20,000 tons of waste, with each ball taking up to 400 years to decompose. Max Shilt, a recent high school graduate from Sunny Isles Beach, decided that did not have to be the answer.

BounceBackBalls is a Miami-Dade initiative Max built and runs entirely on his own. He personally coordinates pickups from academies, clubs and individual donors across South Florida and delivers the balls directly to organizations where they still serve a purpose. They end up protecting chair legs in elementary school classrooms, as toys for shelter dogs, and on the walkers of nursing home residents, giving them a second life that has nothing to do with a tennis court.

Above: Max Shilt holding the State Runner Up trophy after the Alonzo and Tracy Mourning Senior High School Sharks competed in the 2A FHSAA Boys Team Tennis Championships.

To date, Max Shilt has repurposed thousands of tennis and padel balls across 10+ partner organizations in Miami-Dade, including Extreme Tennis Academy, Casas Padel Club, David Lawrence Jr. K-8 Center, Hampton Court Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, and the Humane Society of Greater Miami, just to name a few. This fall, Max heads to the University of Florida and BounceBackBalls is expanding with him to Gainesville.

Florida players, coaches and academies interested in donating balls or partnering with the program can learn more at www.bouncebackballs.org.

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Source: Bounce Back Balls. Photo credit (top): Atomic Taco, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr. All subsequent photos furnished for Florida Tennis are courtesy of Max Shilt.

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