A Retired Tennis Champion Serves Good Times to Ailing Youngsters

As star tennis players like Venus Williams and Jennifer Capriati were training for this summer’s round of professional tournaments,

the former teenage tennis star Andrea Jaeger was busy returning lobs and volleys on a court at Silver Lining Ranch, a camp Ms. Jaeger founded for children with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. As campers took turns hitting balls with Ms. Jaeger, they seemed largely unaware that the woman with the big laugh and flying blond locks was once the No. 2 female player in the world. Ms. Jaeger kept up a stream of chatter with the campers, challenging the kids to hit harder and praising their strokes as she bounded after every ball.

“When I was on the tennis court, I ran around chasing down everything and didn’t give up,” she says. “Here, it’s the same thing.”

$6-Million Facility

After she retired from tennis in 1987, Ms. Jaeger, 36, channeled her drive on the court to her Silver Lining Foundation, which she started with $1.4-million she had earned from tennis prizes.

She works hard to create an intimate, uplifting atmosphere for kids who tend to be viewed more as patients than as children. She tenaciously talked to anyone and everyone she could to raise $6-million to build the camp from a small group that met in rented hotel rooms to one that today has a spacious permanent home with a game room, swimming pool, and horse corral. Ms. Jaeger and her youthful, tight-knit staff participate in the activities for each weeklong session, including fishing at the actor Kevin Costner’s nearby ranch, horseback riding, and white-water rafting. The staff members follow up with the kids for months, even years, after they leave.

“It’s not a camp where the kids come for a week and have a great time and then they go home and that’s it,” says Pam Temmen, who has volunteered at Silver Lining for several years. “They literally keep in contact with the kids, help with scholarships, help with medicine, help with treatment, help with whatever is going on in their lives.”

Feeling Like an Outsider

Ms. Jaeger supports these kids partly because of her own difficulties growing up on the women’s tennis tour. After she became a professional tennis player at age 14, she no longer fit in at her Chicago high school. And Ms. Jaeger didn’t relate to tour players who dined at fancy restaurants while she craved McDonald’s. She often felt like an outcast in both worlds.

Kids who come to the Silver Lining Ranch have often been treated differently as well — either gingerly by their families and doctors or shunned by friends who can’t cope with being close to a sick person. Through the camp’s monthly newsletter, where past campers give updates on their lives, and a toll-free number to call Ms. Jaeger or her colleagues, the Silver Lining Foundation seeks to create a community where the kids will always belong.

At the same time, the camp does not focus on the often terminal diseases that set many of the participants apart. “This camp isn’t about illness, and it isn’t about what we can’t do,” says James V. McKinnell, a pediatric oncologist at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, in New York, and the camp’s medical director. “It’s really about turning the kids around and pointing them in the direction of what they can do again.”

Since many physical activities are planned, Silver Lining staff members ask hospitals around the country to recommend patients in remission, or who feel well enough to fully participate. They also urge doctors to seek youths whose families might not be able to afford a vacation or to send the child to a costly camp. The charity covers the campers’ airfare — once even chartering private planes because a hailstorm damaged commercial jets — and all expenses during the week. About 20 campers ages 8 to 18 from as close as Denver and as far away as Wales attend each of the two winter and five summer sessions. The ranch doesn’t hold additional sessions because of zoning laws, and also the desire to keep kids in school.

“Sometimes you get kids who are scared, or it’s the first time away from home, or their head was shaved last week, and they are not feeling well because of the medication, and in the beginning of the week that’s the reality of the situation,” says John Klonowski, a professional chef who volunteers at Silver Lining. “But by the end of the week, 99 percent of the kids are smiling, and happy, and doing things that I’m sure they never in their life thought they would.”

After the campers leave, the Silver Lining Foundation works hard to build a permanent connection by sending each person a lengthy videotape documenting the week’s activities, and every year sends festive gift baskets to participants to mark Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Easter. The organization also helps with college scholarships and medical bills, and flies families to the ranch for retreats when camp is not in session.

When she is not participating in the camp or fund raising, Ms. Jaeger, along with several staff members, visits hospitals around the country where there are children too sick to travel far. The foundation’s staff members bring toys and take the children to special events, including tennis tournaments where they often meet top players including Andre Agassi, Lindsay Davenport, and Pete Sampras, who are also donors to the foundation.

Ms. Jaeger develops close friendships with some campers, visiting their homes at times, talking to them regularly on the phone, and sometimes speaking at a graduation or attending a wedding. However, there is one aspect of the campers’ lives she does not participate in. “We have kind of a silent policy that we don’t go to funerals, because we would be going to so many,” says Ms. Jaeger. “One, I don’t think the staff could handle that, and two, our programs are for the children, and at that point, hopefully the child is somewhere else, hopefully running around, and playing, and not having cancer.”

A Hospital Visit

Ms. Jaeger traces the foundation’s genesis to an impromptu visit to the children’s ward of a hospital when she was 15. She brought armloads of toys, played video games with a boy who had lost his hands, and watched a little girl dance with her IV pole. “Here I thought I was this major Santa Claus, coming in with all these gifts, and these kids appreciated life more than anyone I had seen,” she says.

After a shoulder injury ended her tennis career, she turned to researching how charities operate, as well as the rules of running a charity. She volunteered at the H. Lee Moffett Cancer Center, in Tampa, Fla., where she then lived, and read books about business and nonprofit organizations.

While in Tampa, she met Heidi Bookout, the tennis director of a resort who became the foundation’s vice president. Ms. Bookout’s sister Beene Smyley and another friend, Kate Anderson, also helped Ms. Jaeger start the organization. In the early years, when fund raising from other sources was discouraging, the four women worked at the Continental Airlines ticket counter in Aspen to earn free tickets for the campers.

“Other people used to think, oh, you are just doing this to get your childhood back,” says Ms. Jaeger. “You don’t get up at 5 a.m. to fund raise to get your childhood back.”

Raising Money

During the first seven years of the charity’s operation, Ms. Jaeger was not devoting all her time to good works. To support herself and the charity, Ms. Jaeger provided television commentaries on tennis tournaments and gave tennis lessons. But as the nonprofit group began to thrive, she realized that her other jobs were taking up too much of her time, and she began drawing a $150,000 annual salary from the foundation.

Ms. Jaeger says she spends almost all of her waking hours thinking about who to approach for money; she used to tack on her wall the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans for inspiration. “I would go to book-reader-association meetings, bingo classes, anything to reach out to connect people to what we were doing,” she says. Last year, she raised more than $3-million for the foundation, and she hopes to raise $40-million in the near future for an endowment.

Four key donors — the former tennis star John McEnroe, Fritz and Fabi Benedict, and Ted Forstmann — helped make the foundation a success, she says. On Christmas Day in 1990, Mr. McEnroe made the first major gift the charity ever received, in an amount Ms. Jaeger declines to specify. He continues to donate annually and helped persuade Nike, the sporting-goods company, to contribute goods to give away as prizes during camp. The Benedicts, longtime Aspen residents, donated 10 acres of land on the town’s edge for the ranch. And Ted Forstmann, a partner in Forstmann Little, a private investment firm, in New York, provided $1.7-million to start construction of the ranch. He also persuaded his former company, Gulfstream Aerospace, to underwrite the charity’s annual gala for the last three years.

In addition to Mr. McEnroe, other famous names pop up in connection to the group. The supermodel Cindy Crawford, whose brother died of leukemia, is on the board. She also helped promote the Silver Lining Pals, stuffed animals available at F.A.O. Schwartz toy stores, where $2 from every sale benefits the ranch. Sales have raised nearly $600,000 for the group. The actor Paul Newman, who started the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Connecticut for children with cancer or serious blood diseases, has contributed financially, and when Ms. Jaeger was just starting out, he promoted her charity at a dinner in his honor, she says. Of Ms. Jaeger’s determination to make her charity work, Mr. Newman has said: “I suspect if we did a program called ‘Survivor’ together, I would be the low man on the totem pole.”

Despite her past fame as a tennis player, Ms. Jaeger says that when she started fund raising, she didn’t know too many celebrities or wealthy people.

“People say, ‘Well, gosh, I don’t have those connections,’ and you know what, I didn’t either,” she says. “There was somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody to get me somewhere, and you never know who it is.”

Meeting people face to face works best to promote the organization, she says. Ms. Jaeger once arrived at a prospective donor’s office at 6 a.m. so she could hand-deliver materials when he walked in the door. Another time, she waited until 1:30 a.m. at a party to talk to Arnon Milchan, who produced the films Pretty Woman and L.A. Confidential, among others. Mr. Milchan is now chairman of the foundation’s board.

“I just get excited when I talk about what we are doing, and people tend to say you just get excited along with her and you want to be part of it,” Ms. Jaeger says.

A ‘Selfless’ Athlete

In addition to gifts from celebrities (Ms. Jaeger won’t say the amount of most gifts), the people the foundation touches find ways to give back, including small donations from parents, and a gift of $9,000 in donations from a camper’s memorial service, she says.

Press attention has also helped with fund raising.

One Minnesota woman, after seeing Ms. Jaeger and the charity recently profiled on Dateline NBC, contacted the group.

“I loved the story tonight and am moved to help out, even if it’s only a little bit,” she wrote in an e-mail message. “It’s nice to see a professional athlete who is selfless in this age of self-absorbed athletes.”

Ms. Jaeger seems barely interested in herself, even down to the worn flannel shirt she likes to wear at the ranch and her rumpled hairstyle. “This program is her life,” says Dr. McKinnell. “If she is not here with the kids, she is on the road fund raising, and trying to make contacts.”

Ms. Jaeger has not married, nor does she have children, saying she would rather focus on her personal life after she raises money for the foundation’s endowment.

“You can’t have the white-picket-fence life and do this at the same time,” she says. “I really don’t have any reason to talk to anyone or to have them in my life unless they are going to help the foundation.”

However, after she reaches her endowment goal, Ms. Jaeger has more plans to carry out.

Two years ago she started another charity, Little Star, that she hopes will emphasize spirituality, and help families, children, doctors, and nurses cope better with the emotional part of sickness. Ms. Jaeger is doing her part to learn these skills as well — next year she will receive a degree in theology and ministry with an emphasis on biblical counseling from the Institute of Theology and Ministry Training.

“I think there are a lot of givers out there financially but not emotionally, and not everybody can handle it, especially on this level,” says Ms. Temmen, the volunteer. “But she is married to this place. These are her kids; we are her family.”