Hi Folks,
This is the first official post on Rebounces.com, and I just wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and say thanks for taking a look. The fact that you’re here tells us that you either love tennis, care about reducing waste, or both. All of us at Rebounces are definitely in the “both” category, and passionately so.
While this is the new Rebounces website, we’re actually not that new. We’re going on our third year of recycling and providing tennis professionals with quality practice balls. I’ve got to take a moment and thank Raul Bermudez. Raul is the head pro at Rebsamen Tennis Center in Little Rock and a former tour player. He was the first on board and was instrumental in helping me refine the recharging process. Back then I would provide him with a basket of balls and then come back the next week and get feedback. Usually this feedback was quite good, but I remember one instance where this was not the case. He told me that some of his students were hitting a lot of the balls over the fence. Let me interject that Raul is from Venezuela, and while he is very articulate in English, because of the accent (I’m a hillbilly) I still sometimes have trouble picking up the nuances of what he is telling me. So I said something like- so your students need a little more practice, but everybody hits the ball over the fence sometimes. Raul shook his head and said, “But not bouncing them over on their serve!”
Two things I’ll say here: First, the students loved the balls (who doesn’t want to serve like Roddick?). Two, I realized I had had a momentary bout of dyslexia and had reversed a compound in the process. The problem was quickly fixed. Enough said.
In January of this 2008, I joined with my longtime friends, Grant Garland and Cannon Fletcher, and officially incorporated Rebounces. However, both of these guys had been involved in the planning of Rebounces for several years. Grant and I first met at the tennis courts in 7th grade and have been battling it out ever since. While we’re all club players, Grant does hold the unique distinction of being the only person to ever successfully hurl his racquet over the Quail Tree Health and Racquet Club and into the swimming pool (no one was hurt). Even back then, the kid had an arm on him. Cannon and I met while completing our MBA’s. It was over a couple of cold ones after class (maybe it was during) that the first attempts at a business plan were taken.
I can’t go further without thanking my wonderful wife, Shelley, for putting up with all the late nights spent in the workshop working on the Rebounces process and the hours of daily discussions about tennis balls! My son Andrew is 4 years old and is a big Baghdatis fan (what’s up with that?). We’ll be welcoming a new member to our family in November.
Anyway, that’s a little background on who we are. We hope you’ll try our product. And remember, don’t throw those tennis balls away!
Bill Dirst
CEO/Rebounces, LLC