Earlier this week, I decided that I wanted to mail a coloring book as a small gift to a 3-year-old girl. It would be off-brand for me to send anything other than one that was tennis themed. This innocuous easy-looking idea turned out to be much more challenging than I thought it would be.
While there are many tennis coloring books on Amazon, none of them have credible customer reviews. Rather than guessing which one(s) might be best, I ordered… a lot of them. It’s been a long time since I have personally been in the coloring book target demographic, but I think I retained enough from that stage of life to confidently state that none of the ones I received qualify as great.
In the “nothing ever sounds difficult to the person who has never done it” category, it simply cannot be that hard to create a quality coloring book. The fact that no one has successfully done so, suggests otherwise.
This exercise has forced me to think through the criteria of what I was looking for. First, coloring book pages should be single-sided. This is to prevent the ink from bleeding through the page. Additionally, coloring book pages are meant to be ripped out and hung on the refrigerator. I am hard over on single sided pages.
The books I received would have all benefitted from a style guide and some editorial standards. Even the ones I determined to be “best” had serious flaws. Sometimes “best” actually means “least worst.”
The litany of irritations included inconsistent artwork, including shoddy traces of photographs and obviously pirated images. Unlicensed use of Disney characters was not uncommon. One contained stock coloring book images with a tennis racquet poorly superimposed on the picture. Many contained filler images that were unrelated to tennis. One book had quality artwork but only included images of boys.
There is a serious opportunity for an organization such as the USTA to step up and make a difference. The mission of the non-profit is “to promote and develop the growth of tennis.” The plethora of Net Generation and quick-start programs reveals that the organization knows that instilling a love for our sport from the earliest ages is essential.
The USTA could easily commission the creation of a quality coloring book. Alternatively, this could be run as a contest that would enlist the aid of older children to create the artwork with the winners appearing in the book. I may take a crack at creating a coloring page or two myself in the near future.
In the meantime, if you want to give a tennis coloring book to a kid, I would recommend these two that are currently listed on Amazon. I will also review all the coloring books I purchased on that site so that future consumers will know what they are getting.
If anyone is aware of a high quality tennis themed coloring book, I would appreciate the pointer.
 | Tennis Coloring Book For Kids |
 | TENNIS Coloring Book For Kids Ages 8-12 |
