My name is Rodrigo De Almeida and I am currently the Tennis Health Program Coordinator for the University of North Texas Women’s program. I moved to the United States from my home country of Brazil in 2010 after receiving an athletic scholarship to play for Western New Mexico University. During my five years at WNMU I had a great experience both on and off the courts while completing my Bachelor of Science degree in Physical Education. In 2018 I earned my Master of Education - Exercise Science degree from Campbell University where I was also the Tennis Graduate Assistant Coach. I then became the Tennis Assistant Coach at University of Texas at El Paso for one year before moving to Denton, TX where I have been with UNT for almost three full seasons. 
 
I have always had a great passion for tennis fitness and have been blessed with opportunities to study and gain knowledge in this field year after year. This KI Tennis Footwork and Movement Fellowship is another fantastic opportunity for me and I am extremely excited and grateful to have been accepted to be involved in such great project. 

My name is Tomas Patino; I'm from Medellin, Colombia. Tennis has been my lifelong passion. I first picked up a racquet when I was 5 and started competing nationally when I was 11. My highest national junior ranking was #1 in doubles and #2 in singles. I played Division 1 tennis at Oklahoma State University and then at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where I was a team captain for the last 2 years and won the conference championship twice with my team. While playing college tennis I studied civil engineering, and after graduating I became the graduate assistant coach at UMKC. It was then that I realized that my passion for tennis went beyond just playing and decided to pursue coaching as a career.
 
After graduating from my masters at UMKC I wanted to learn more from other great coaches and programs and was very fortunate to get a chance to shadow the Baylor Men's tennis program for a year. After returning to Colombia I decided that I wanted to keep learning so that I could help the players and coaches here, and help improve Colombian tennis. I coach privately and I'm also involved with a charity that helps impoverished children through tennis. My goal with the charity is to help as many kids as possible to achieve a tennis scholarship in the US. The courses, webinars and Q&A sessions from Dr. Kovacs and the Kovacs Institute have been a turning point in my coaching because I'm finally starting to learn how to take advantage of my engineering skills and apply them in my coaching. I'm very excited about being a KI Tennis Serve Fellow!