Episode 3 Chris Dudley - ”Shreveport-Bossier: My City, My Community, My Home”

Chris Dudley, Director of Tennis at Querbes Tennis Center, sits down with Jeffrey Goodman, Director of Marketing and Development for the YMCA of Northwest Louisiana, to answer the following questions:

1:08 1. Chris, you grew up in Rockville Maryland, lived and worked in St. Louis and Atlanta, before finally coming to the Shreveport-Bossier area at the beginning of 2020.

 

New people moving to a community are invaluable for so many reasons. Chief among those, in my opinion, is the fresh set of eyes they bring. It is hard to define oneself or even one’s community, you are too close to the subject. But the newly arrived, because they are viewing things from the outside, can often see more clearly.

 

So with all of that, what do you see when you look at Shreveport-Bossier? Or in other words, how do you describe this community to your friends and family who have never been here before?

 

3:16 2. Let’s talk tennis for a second. You are the Director of Tennis at Querbes Tennis Center which underwent an important and significant renovation a couple of years ago. I’ll go ahead and show my hand. I’m an avid tennis player and have been around the game my entire life.

 

One thing I’ve been most struck by since you came to town is the way you have transformed Querbes into being more of a community center than I ever recall it being during my lifetime. You clearly enjoy bringing people together and you have a way of making tennis and Querbes as a whole a very warm and unintimidating place for people.

 

Where does this desire to create community come from? How did you learn it?

 

10:24 3. What are some of the things in the community you like doing most when you’re not on the tennis court?

 

14:10 4. What have we yet to figure out compared to some of the other places where you have lived and worked?

 

19:15 5. What do we do better than the other places where you have lived and worked?