A young Rotorua tennis player creates a unique table and chair out of tennis balls

How many tennis balls do you need to make a wonderful and unique chair? Apparently 1012, as Rotorua’s Jessica Martin, 14, discovered.

The Rotorua Lakes High School student spent hours creating a chair and table out of old tennis balls. His goal was to reuse them, since recycling options are limited.

Jessica says she is a member of the Lynmore Tennis Club and there were a lot of old tennis balls that the club had to get rid of.

My dad was looking online for repurposing tennis balls and saw a huge tennis ball chair. He thought it was cool and said why don’t we do it with ours. I said yeah, I’ll do it.

I kind of said it as a joke, but the next day he sent a picture of his car and it was full.

It took 1,012 tennis balls and a lot of hot glue to create the chair alone, he says.

The Lynmore, Rotorua, Otumoetai, Papamoa and Whakatane tennis clubs donated used tennis balls for the creations.

Jessica was happy with the end result of the furniture and thought the table and chair looked great, but was sad to see the process over.

He says that he enjoyed watching over and working on this project at night.

Jessica is donating a unique table and chair to Lynmore Tennis Club and hopes they will help raise the profile of her club. Hopefully this will put us on the map.

I think this is a great way to prevent tennis balls from being thrown in the trash when it could serve other purposes.

I will make more and hopefully the next one will be better. Also, if I make another one, I’ll probably auction it off so it can help raise money for charity.

Jessica says that if you’re bored at home, it’s a good idea to find something that can’t be recycled very well and turn it into something else.

He says that he has been playing tennis for about three years. He started at age 8, took a break and started again at age 11.

He likes to meet new people through sports and enjoys both the team and individual aspects of the game.

This is a Public Interest Journalism role funded through NZ On Air