BY JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com
If you grew up playing sports in the city, there’s a good chance your life was touched in a meaningful way by the work of Mike Silverman.
Silverman, now 58, grew up in Briarwood, attending Hillcrest High School and later Queens College. His father, who played handball and hockey, was from East New York, while his mother dabbled in tennis back home in Ohio — the two met while ice skating at Rockefeller Center, when Silverman’s dad “accidentally” collided with the pretty stranger across the rink.
Silverman’s favorite sports as a kid were basketball and tackle football, neither of which was obvious with his less imposing build. Taking matters into his own hands, Silverman started organizing pick-up games around his neighborhood to help ensure that he’d be chosen for a team. “I’d say, ‘Hey guys, I organized this thing,” he recalled. “Can you maybe allow me to play too now?”
It’s a fitting origin story for a man who would go on to become a patron saint of youth sports in New York City. Silverman cut his teeth in the 1980s as the director of the Parks Department’s free tennis programs, looking for ways to make the city’s nearly 700 tennis courts accessible to kids from all backgrounds.
“It’s a crazy number,” Silverman said of the high supply of courts. “But they’re a resource that needs to be used. If that many courts exist in the city, then I’ve kind of viewed my job all these years as trying to keep those courts active, as much as I can. Because if they just sit there, then what’s the point?”
One of Silverman’s fondest memories from that period was witnessing Vitas Gerulaitis, a Howard Beach native known as the “Lithuanian Lion” who was briefly the world No. 3 tennis player before his tragic death, hold clinics in Central Park with fellow star John McEnroe. The pair would give rackets to each of the 300 kids who attended, many of whom had never experienced the joy of tennis before. “It really made an impact on me,” said Silverman, underlining the enormous potential of using NYC’s abundance of both celebrities and parks to open doors.
But that mission was endangered in the 1990s, when the Parks Department — the victim of a lean year for the city budget — was forced to cut its tennis programming. Luckily, a nonprofit called the CityParks Foundation (CPF) intervened to save the initiative, funding it primarily with private donations. That model has been a blessing, Silverman said, freeing the program from the specter of budget rollbacks and allowing it to expand into multiple sports.
Among the new-look program’s biggest boosters was none other than Billie Jean King. In the late 90s, Silverman reached out to the legendary King, whom he knew through a mutual friend, to see if she could help expand his operation; the two eventually crossed paths on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, where they ducked into a car to escape the pouring rain. Silverman made his case, and King was in, hosting an annual benefit (this year’s edition is September 1) and connecting the program with the resources of the United States Tennis Association.
“She’s been 100% behind what we do from day one, which is pretty remarkable,” said Silverman. “There’s a lot of things she could support, but she understands that this is as grassroots as it gets. We’re just trying to grow the game, keep kids playing, and develop them on and off the court.”
Those goals, always important, have taken on special significance in the wake of the pandemic. On the one hand, interest in outdoor activities has risen — CPF’s tennis program surged from about 5,000 pre-Covid participants to roughly 10,000 today — and instructors have a range of new tools and methods to engage students. But the cost to parents of enrolling their kids in youth sports has also ballooned, increasing by 46% nationwide from 2019 to 2024, making free programming even more invaluable.
Silverman’s legacy extends beyond tennis, however. When asked about his proudest achievements, he mentions another sport: golf. At the peak of Tiger Woods’ fame in the 90s and early 2000s, parents would consistently ask whether CPF offered golf lessons. It wasn’t unprecedented, since Silverman remembered the city busing kids out to driving ranges when he was younger. But that seemed inefficient to him.
Instead, Silverman and his team set out to “create an ecosystem” from the ground up, converting underused baseball fields throughout the city into golf courses. Offerings now include a six-hole, par 3 course in Bay Ridge, open to all city residents aged six to 17, as well as a golf center and driving range in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, both completely free of charge.
Writing in 2010 for LI Tennis, Steven Kaplan called Silverman “The most important person in local tennis over the last 25 years that you have probably never heard of.” More than a decade later, Silverman continues to shape the landscape of youth sports in NYC without much fanfare. As he enters a transitional role at CPF as director of special projects and prepares for his next chapter, Silverman takes comfort in knowing that his successors share his passion — and that, like Gerulaitis, McEnroe, and King, he’s made an impact of his own.
“Being able to change lives and do it on a large scale,” mused Silverman. “What more can you ask from a job?”
