History of AIA Tennis

The AIA Tennis ministry started in 1972 as a ministry to professional tennis players when Kansas City pro

Ramsey Earnhart began providing chapel services on the road for competitors. An international tennis

ministry began in 1988, when Campus Crusade staff member Chris Kaupp traveled to South America in 1987.

Chris caught the vision for international sports ministry while on that tour. She continued to work with

athletes in Illinois with Campus Crusade’s campus ministry for four years before re-locating to Colorado

Springs to give leadership to the tennis ministry. Men’s and women’s teams travel abroad to do ministry, first

through tournaments, then club matches, during Chris’s ten years as AIA tennis director. Chris transitioned to

another ministry in 1999, and no one was available to take her place. In 2005, however, former pro tennis

player and current staff member Lindsay Sullivan took a team of tennis players to Kazakhstan on a summer

tour. In 2006 and 2007, one tour traveled to India, another to Nepal. A team journeyed back to Nepal in 2008 and 2009.Currently, Sullivan is developing a global tennis ministry: serving the needs and helping professional tennis players grow in their faith, empowering AIA international ministries in efforts to reach tennis players and sending teams of players abroad like before. 

History of AIA

1966-2009: more coming soon!

Athletes in Action (AIA) was founded in 1966 by Dave Hannah upon the premise that athletes and coaches are some of the most influential people in any society around the world. If we can reach the athlete and coach for Christ, they can have a tremendous impact on our culture for God’s kingdom. A former director of AIA said it well: a society looking up to athletes as heroes must find heroes looking up to God. What started out as a group of wrestlers and basketball players working to that end is now a worldwide movement of athletes and coaches making an impact for Christ in all corners of the globe. Over the years, we have grown in ways that likely many of our first AIA staff would have never dreamed.