ATHERTON — Tyler Nii won’t ever coach again. That doesn’t mean his influence within the tight-knit community of youth tennis will soon be forgotten.
Two months after the 27-year-old perished during a skydiving accident in New Zealand on Jan. 10, a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 3 p.m. for “Let’s Play Clay” in Atherton will honor his memory and all that he stood for at Holbrook-Palmer Park on Saturday.
“Tyler was an outstanding individual,” said Tamara Rajaram, whose 11-year-old daughter Natasha spent the past four years under Nii’s tutelage. “I don’t think I can say enough about him and the impact he had as a friend, as a coach and a mentor to our daughter. We really wanted to do something more for him.”
The Rajaram family spearheaded the effort to donate a public clay court in the Bay Area, settling on Atherton with the help of Michael Jessup, managing director of Player Capital Tennis, which operates the site.
“It’s the first public clay court in Northern California that we know of,” Jessup said. “So it’s really exciting for our community to be able to experience kind of what you see on TV at the French Open. There’s just a lot of benefits to clay for our junior players. Also, as far as our senior population, clay courts are great because they’re softer on the body and it allows tennis players to play a lot longer into life.”
Tyler Nii felt drawn to a tennis racket at 3 years old, but it wasn’t until the age of 8 that he began to focus on the sport after dabbling in other athletic endeavors.
“As his parents we couldn’t keep up, so we told him he had to narrow it down,” said his mother, Nancy. “So he picked tennis and basketball.”
A 2008 graduate of Leigh High in San Jose, it was only 10 miles away from his alma mater that Tyler caught one of his big breaks after Jason Scalese hired his eventual replacement to coach the JV teams at Archbishop Mitty in San Jose.
“A lot of the kids saw him as a big brother, as a counselor,” Scalese said. “He was firm, but at the same time laid back, very fun loving. Certainly had a goofy side to him.”
Nii took over the boys program in 2014, when Scalese opted to retire.
A year later, both were reunited at Player Capital, a youth tennis program that holds lessons in Holbrook-Palmer Park, as well as Palo Alto, Redwood City and Cupertino.
“My first impression of Tyler is he had a lot of passion,” said Jessup, who founded Player Capital in 2004 and brought Tyler on board as a teaching professional. “He had a purpose at young age that he wanted to be coaching youth tennis. I could tell his heart was in the right place and that he would be a great teacher and coach.”
Her mother said: “He was just coming into his own with being a tennis coach and you could really sense a change in him. He was starting to just really enjoy life and the coaching really helped him develop and grow and mature.”
That’s what makes it so hard for so many to reconcile with the tragic news of Jan. 10, 2018, when Tyler Nii sunk to the bottom of the Lake Wakatipu, near Queenstown — his body never recovered.
“It was shocking and sad,” Jessup said. “Everything was going in the right direction and then that just kind of just hit.”
“When this happened, the impact was emotional,” Scalese said. “It was … I’ve lost a friend, I’ve lost a big brother, I’ve lost a colleague.”
To understand how many people he influenced in a short period of time, look no further than his memorial service on Feb. 8 in San Jose at the Buddhist Church Betsuin.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Scalese, who estimated over 800 people in attendance that evening.
“It was just overwhelming how many people showed up to show their respects,” Nancy Nii said. “It was just amazing. The kids at Mitty wrote letters, either to Tyler or to us, showing basically their love for him. They thought of him as a brother, not as a coach. But they respected him as a coach and he connected with them so well that we were so surprised because you just don’t hear that side about your kid.
“It was so heartwarming to hear all the wonderful things people having been saying about him.”
The testimonials kept coming after Player Capital partnered with USTA NorCal, on which Tyler Nii was a board member, with a mission to keep “Tyler’s name embedded in the tennis community for decades to come.”
That’s the reason the Tyler Nii High School Tennis Award was established, which beginning in 2019 will seek out a boy and a girl at the high school level to receive a scholarship at the annual USTA Aces Awards Ceremony.
The ambitious goal to raise $100,000 is roughly two-thirds of the way to fruition, and Saturday’s “Let’s Play Clay” event should boost the effort to fund the award for the foreseeable future.
At the very least, anyone who gets tennis shoes and socks dirty on the clay court at Holbrook-Palmer Park in Atherton will get a chance to carry on Tyler Nii’s love for the sport.
“It really is our hope that this is a very long-lasting court used quite often by everybody in the community beyond Atherton,” said Rajaram, who recently returned from a USTA national team event in from Tucson, Arizona, where Natasha — a sixth-grader at Harker School in San Jose — earned both a gold ball and sportsmanship award.
Her husband, Gokul, grew up in India without access to tennis courts. But he developed a love for the sport while watching it on TV with his father.
“I never touched a tennis racket and knew nothing of the sport before our daughter started playing,” said Tamara, who grew up in New Mexico and met her husband in business school.
Gokul Rajaram previously worked at Google and Facebook and is currently employed at Square.
The hope is that their family’s altruistic effort will not only benefit Natasha, a “Little Mo” national champion at the age of 9, but a myriad of children.
“Instead of us finding land or putting it in our backyard, so to speak, we felt that making a clay court public and open would be ideal,” said Rajaram, who resides in Cupertino. “And without the need to have to pay an exorbitant amount for a club or to pay quite a bit of money to go to an instructor just to get time on the court.”
A two-hour clinic followed by cake and drinks will take place from 3-5 p.m.
For the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Nancy Nii will be joined by her husband, Bob, along with Tyler’s older brother Kevin, who is married to JuneJune Shih — as long as she doesn’t go into childbirth.
Tales of his uncle will feel bittersweet for 2-year-old Jessa and her soon-to-be born sibling.
“Jessa was just getting to know him,” Nancy Nii said. “That’s going to be tough, because she called him her uncle Lyler. She couldn’t pronounce Tyler, I guess. So she’d go, ‘Lyler, Lyler!’ ”
Teaming up with Tyler’s mom to cut the ribbon is none other than Natasha Rajaram, who will join forces in memory of the one person who can’t attend.
“I think a lot of the kids are still kind of going through the process of having to realize that he’s not with us anymore,” Rajaram said. “My daughter included.”
Gone, but never forgotten, Tyler’s legacy lives in his protégé, among many others who will slide on clay at Holbrook-Palmer Park for years to come.
“She was just his pride and joy,” Nancy Nii said.
If you wish to contribute to the Tyler Nii Scholarship Award, click here.
