‘Just a tennis player’ but into the world champs

Being blind is no barrier to Lissie Cleave as she prepares to serve up a storm at the Blind Tennis World Championships in northern Italy at the end of September.
Cleave, 44, and her twin sister Shannon, are both legally blind and albino. Albinism is a rare genetic condition that causes the lack of pigment in skin, hair and eyes and is sometimes accompanied by visual impairment.
Born in Thames, they lived in the Hauraki Plains for most of their childhood, attending Ngatea Primary School, before heading on to Hauraki Plains college.
Growing up in a small community like Ngatea, Cleave recalls that there wasn’t much inclusion or diversity, especially when it came to sport, although the twins did swim, travelling to Sydney as teenagers to represent New Zealand.
“Once you get to being an adult and you hit 19 or 20, there’s no real pathway for visually impaired sport. There’s no-one directing those youths into adult sports,” she says.
“We spend all our time having very nice people, who we are very grateful for, taking us to doctor’s appointments and visits and work and those kinds of things, but you end up with nobody or no network to actually get you to sport, because you’re asking people to help you to do all the basic things and then you’re getting people to do extra things.”
As well as swimming, Cleave managed to ride horses in her teens, as well as participating in dog agility and dog obedience.
“I was very lucky to find passionate people in those sports that lived near me and who didn’t mind picking me and my dog up and taking us, or picking me and my horse up,” she says.
In early 2020, she was living rurally and suffered a medical crisis, an experience which has brought her a new perspective on life, and has developed into a love of a new sport for her, blind tennis.
“I’m lucky to be here. From then I’ve pretty much thought I’ve only got one life and I need to push. This is my first year of playing blind tennis, but I have the desire and the push to get it going and do it. I don’t want to miss anything now as this is bonus time [for me],” she says.
“My sister and I went down to the local tennis club when they were having junior try-outs when we were about 10. Funnily enough, when they threw the ball at us to hit it back across the net we couldn’t actually see it. They [the club] didn’t have much diversity to try and work through that, so they said to come back when we could hit the ball, so we never went back.
“It’s always been in the back of my mind, it’s always been there and there’s been a connection to the game and when I came up to Paparoa, which is where I am now, I was encouraged to go to the local tennis club and borrow a racket and hit a ball so that I could get moving. That was October last year and I would just go down and hit a ball against the wall and do a little bit to get moving and get fit again after being sick.”
Cleave got on the internet to see if there were any alterations or something you could do to tennis to make it more accessible and found out about blind and low-vision tennis which was invented in Japan in 1984 by Takei Miyoshi. Born in 1968, Miyoshi lost his eyesight at the age of 18 months. When he was 16 and at high school, he dreamed of being able to play tennis and so invented the sport.
Blind tennis is played on a smaller court to traditional tennis, with a slightly lowered net. Players use shorter rackets for better manoeuvrability and rely on hearing to track the ball’s position. This ball is larger, made of sponge, and contains bells or other noisemakers that emit a sound when bouncing.
The basic rules of tennis remain largely the same, with some adjustments for the audible ball. Depending on a player’s visual impairment classification, they may be allowed one to three bounces before returning the shot. The classifications are as follows:
B1 – No sight, players allowed three bounces of the ball and nets lowered.
B2 – Partial sight and players allowed three bounces of the ball.
B3 – Partial sight and players allowed two bounces of the ball.
B4 and B5 – Partial sight and allowed one bounce of the ball.
Cleave’s next step was to order some of the special balls and get down to club night on a regular basis. But Lissie being Lissie, it wasn’t going to end there and although her research saw her discover there were no tournaments in New Zealand, there were some in Australia.
She travelled to Melbourne in March this year and played in the Victoria Open and then went back to Australia to play the New South Wales Open in Sydney in June. The Victoria tournament appealed because they had a classification day before the tournament to understand what classification she was, because it was proving hard to establish in New Zealand, given the lack of regulation around blind tennis. That had meant she would have had to go to multiple optometrists to get an understanding of where she sat. In Melbourne, she was classified B3.
“I had an awesome few days in Melbourne meeting a lot of their tennis players. They play at the National Tennis Centre in Melbourne and we were allowed access to all the professional facilities that they use for the Australian Open. There were about 46 competing in Melbourne and about 36 in Sydney, so that was quite cool to be there with so many people. It was just like walking into a normal tournament except everyone had guide dogs,” says Cleave.
The youngest player in Melbourne was 12. The organisers often mix grades to give the players more games and Cleave ended up playing against both B2 and B3 players in Melbourne.
“When I got onto the court in Melbourne, I didn’t even know which side of the net I needed to be on to serve for the first time. The umpires they had were at the Australian Open earlier in the year and now they’re telling me which side of the net to be on, with  the best of grace. It was awesome,” she says.
“It was quite pleasing to see that in Sydney there were people needing to know which side of the court they needed to stand on, not me, so I had retained the information.”
Her exploits came to the attention of the International Blind Tennis Association (IBTA) and their head of technical, Martin Etheridge. He was keen for New Zealand to take part and help develop the sport here.
As a result, she put in a wildcard application for the upcoming World Championships and it was accepted. It will play host to approximately 140 participants from 25 countries. There will be 12 women in her category and at the end of that week away she should come home with a world ranking.
As well as that event, which runs from September 23-29, Cleave has also been accepted into the main draw at the inaugural IBTA European Open Championships in Poland the week before with athletes from 14 countries.
Funding the trip is hard, as Cleave isn’t currently in paid employment. She does volunteer and committee work, but is on a benefit. She’ll be using savings to get to Europe. To assist, she has a Give a Little page and her local tennis club is running raffles and a quiz night at the end of August.
Cleave now meets her trainer, Niki Le Mesurier, every week. They actually met five or six years ago, but she didn’t realise Niki played tennis then. They hire the local hall each week for practice. She’s also been to the Ngatira Tennis Club in Mt Eden where Greg Lim runs a blind and low vision group every second Sunday.
With Lim, she is now in the process of helping the set-up of the NZ Blind Tennis Association which is to be run in conjunction with Blind Sport New Zealand and Tennis NZ. In addition, she will be given an official New Zealand team uniform to wear at the upcoming tournaments.
“It’s absolutely addictive. The people and their enthusiasm. And it’s great just being treated like any other person. I don’t want to be a superstar, I just want to be normal, and it’s not achievable, because I’m not [normal], but in this sphere I can be as close as I can get,” says Cleave.
“You’re not tied to someone. You’re just out on a court on your own, or in doubles, and you’re just a tennis player. It’s nice to be that.”