Hong Kong jobs: Anyone for tennis?


Hong Kong is better known for its financial acumen than its sports prowess and has produced only one world-class player

By Alex Frew McMillan

HONG KONG, China -- One Hong Kong association is trying to beat the city's record jobless rate at its own game -- tennis.

The Hong Kong Tennis Association will hire 300 unemployed young people and train them as coaches, it said this week. Hiring will begin in August.

Once they complete their coaching course and pass an exam, the coaches will earn HK$162 ($21) an hour as tennis instructors.

The new program is not without detractors. But it comes as Hong Kong's Labour Department prepared to unveil its own youth work-training scheme on Wednesday.

"We would also encourage other sports associations to employ more youngsters," Labour Department spokeswoman Hilda Chow told CNN. "We think it can to a certain extent help the unemployment situation."

Teaching in schools to kids

Hong Kong's jobless rate has hit a record 7.7 percent. Restaurant closings, decreased hiring, slumping corporate profits and deflation have sent the job market plunging and the suicide rate up (restaurant sets layoff record).


Despite its glittering image, Hong Kong is battling deflation, shrinking corporate profits and a very tight job market

Graduating high-school students find the job market particularly hard to enter. Many elect to find jobs in mainland China or overseas.

The tennis association program is small in scale. But it will train 200 tennis coaches to teach in schools and 100 to work as assistant coaches.

The association has asked the International Tennis Federation to send in overseas coaches to conduct the training, starting in September.

The association says it will not stipulate education requirements for the coaches. It has also set no age limit, though the aim is to help recent school graduates.

The school coaches will teach "mini-tennis" to children from 4 to 9 years old. It will operate through a government scheme that places coaches in schools to teach 29 sports, including badminton, basketball, fencing and table tennis.

Not true full-time jobs

One coach at a Hong Kong private club doubts the program will help the economy at all. Mini-tennis programs typically last one to two hours a day at maximum.

"It's not really going to be 300 full time jobs they're going to be boosting the economy with," he said.

He also doubted the coaches will stick with their training. "It says they'll get 300, I bet they end up with about 18 by the end of it," he said.

The wages are also a far cry from normal coaching rates. A coach on Hong Kong's public courts typically charges HK$350 ($45) an hour. Private-club lessons cost around HK$500 ($64) an hour.

Hong Kong had a coaching boom in the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, coinciding with the height of the property market. Easy money attracted instructors from around the world.

One top-flight player

But the city has only produced one top-fight tennis player, Patricia Hy-Boulais. Cambodian-born Hy-Boulais learned her tennis growing up in Hong Kong.

She went on to play professionally in the 1990s, ranking as high as 28 in the world. She emigrated to Canada and has now retired.

The recession has hit leisure spending in Hong Kong, and golf has eaten into the sport's popularity.

Hong Kong lags near-neighbors such as Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan. All three produced top-tier male and female players in the 1990s.

India and Japan have arguably been the most successful Asian tennis nations, nurturing a steady line of professional players.