Mini Tennis Isn't New — It's Been Around Since 1985
Shrinking the racket and slowing the ball down to make tennis easier to learn isn't a new idea. It's a 40-year-old one, tested across four continents before it reached Malaysia.
The clearest starting point is the UK. In 1985, England's Lawn Tennis Association launched Short Tennis: plastic rackets, sponge balls, played indoors on a badminton-sized court. The sport's international governing body recognised it as an official development format in 1990, and by 1995 the ITF had published a global Short Tennis Promotional Plan, calling it the ideal method for training children. In 2001, the LTA updated the format into what's now called Mini Tennis — played on a full-size court with kid-sized rackets and a graded ball system: red balls that fly 75% slower than a standard tennis ball, orange at 50%, green at 25%. That red-orange-green progression is still the backbone of junior development worldwide.
Some research traces an earlier version further back. A 2020 literature review on short tennis (Chen & Zhao) places its origin in Sweden in the late 1970s, under the same "mini tennis" name — a decade before the UK's Short Tennis launched. It's a thinner trail than the UK milestone, but it points the same direction: more than one country arrived independently at the idea that full-size equipment was the wrong place to start a beginner.
China picked it up early and ran with it at policy level. Short tennis was introduced there in 1993. By 1996, the State General Administration of Sports had issued formal regulations promoting it nationwide, and the Chinese Tennis Association named it the country's "hope project" for the sport. Two years later came a standardised competition and evaluation system for young players. It's now taught in schools as part of national youth sport policy — one of the clearest examples of a government treating equipment-scaling as sport-development infrastructure, not a novelty format.
Denmark took a quieter, club-level route. Dansk Tennis Forbund has run minitennis for decades as the standard way 5-to-10-year-olds start the game — lightweight rackets, soft and slow balls, the same strokes as full tennis. Because it needs so little space, Danish clubs run it on schoolyards, car parks and community halls through winter, then move it outdoors in summer. It isn't a promotional campaign there; it's simply how the sport begins.
What's consistent across every version, wherever it's credited, is the same fix: bring the equipment down to the player's size and slow the ball down, so a beginner can rally immediately instead of chasing a ball built for someone already good at the game. That's the same principle behind Mini Tennis Malaysia's 21-inch racket and 9cm foam ball — not a rebrand of tennis, but the latest application of an idea that's already been tested in the UK, Sweden, China and Denmark, on the courts that happened to be available at the time. In Malaysia, those courts are increasingly the same ones pickleball is already using.
Sources: Short Tennis/Mini Tennis Knowledge Organiser (Ibstock Community College); Huang, Samsir & Noordin (2024), "Short Tennis Development in China," IJARPED 13(3), citing Chen & Zhao (2020) on the Swedish origin claim; Dansk Tennis Forbund minitennis programme pages; ITF Play and Stay / junior ball progression materials.