The Long Game: Tara Fitzpatrick-Navarro on Building What Outlasts You

For more than 20 years, Tara Fitzpatrick-Navarro has been creating opportunities where none existed before.

As CEO of the USTA Mid-Atlantic Foundation, she’s focused on expanding access to tennis and opening doors for people who have historically been priced out of or overlooked by the sport. Each year, the organization introduces nearly 100,000 students to tennis through school PE programs and funds junior scholarships so a child’s ability to play is never determined by what their family can afford. One of Tara’s proudest initiatives, Girls Rule the Court, has grown from a local after-school program into a model reaching far beyond the region where it began. And perhaps her most ambitious project yet is a $73 million state-of-the-art tennis campus—a bold vision she championed to create the kind of lasting community hub most regions only dream about.

But Tara’s impact extends well beyond the baseline. A certified strengths and financial coach, she also dedicates her time to helping women leaders navigate questions of clarity, confidence, and growth. Whether she's coaching an executive through a pivotal transition or building programs that serve thousands of young people, her work is rooted in the same belief: meaningful change happens when people are given the tools, support, and opportunities to thrive.

Across the campus, the scholarships, the leadership coaching, and everything in between, a clear throughline emerges: Tara isn’t focused on creating momentary success stories. She aims to build institutions, programs, and pathways that will continue changing lives long after she steps away.

Keep reading to learn how she brings that vision to life—and what it takes to build something designed to last.

What are some of the most meaningful impacts your work has had so far?

When one of our girls first came to Girls Rule the Court, she was too shy to speak. After several sessions, she sat in the offices of members of Congress and told them her own story, in her own words. That kind of transformation is the reason Girls Rule the Court exists. 

Girls do not leave sport for lack of ability—but according to the Women's Sports Foundation, by the age of 14, they leave at twice the rate of boys. Research from Nike and Dove found that roughly 45 percent of teenage girls who quit point to body image as the reason. Others blame a dip in confidence that no one helps them through and rooms that make trying and failing feel unsafe. 

Our answer to these trends is Girls Rule the Court: an after-school program that has reached more than 2,000 girls—most of them in Title I schools—in the years that determine whether a girl stays in the game. Now, we are expanding across the country. Nearly every coach is a woman, which isn’t an accident. A girl needs to see someone who looks like the person she is being asked to become. Really, we’re not teaching tennis. We’re using it to teach girls that their worth was never up for debate—and that the voice they find on the court belongs to them everywhere else, including the halls of Congress.

In what ways have your upbringing or past experiences contributed to how you operate as a leader?

I am the daughter of a Northern Irish immigrant, raised by a single mother, and the first in my family to go to college. Nobody handed me a map, and I learned early that if you want a way in, you often have to build it yourself. I was also a shy, quiet kid with a fierce drive to be the best; a competitive swimmer who pushed hard but rarely saw the value in my own effort. It took me years to learn that there was value in showing up, in the hard days, and in the work no one claps for. All of those things were the point. 

That’s why I lead the way I do. I spend less energy fixing people and more time naming the strengths they cannot yet see in themselves because I know what it costs to go without that. It shapes how I run an organization and how I coach women in leadership. The girls in our programs are getting these things years before I did. I built what I needed.

What are the biggest mistakes you’ve made?

My biggest mistake came dressed up as a win. When tennis boomed during the pandemic, our foundation emerged feeling unstoppable. Convinced that momentum and capacity were the same thing, I did what ambitious leaders do and launched five new initiatives at once. But momentum and capacity are not the same thing. 

I almost missed the lesson in my team's language sliding from "we are excited about this" to "I am handling it." For a while, I read as ownership what was actually strain. Now, I know that the most dangerous moment for a leader is right after a win, when your confidence outruns your judgment and the people who love the mission are too loyal to tell you to slow down. I watch for that shift in language the way other people watch the budget.

What’s next for you and your career?

The campus. I am in the hardest stretch of my career right now, working to turn a permanent regional home for tennis from a vision into a built reality, and I think about it almost every waking hour. 

Beyond that, I want Girls Rule the Court in front of girls in every community that needs it, not just ours. I am also growing the coaching side of my work because the women I coach are wrestling with the same questions I am. None of it is a pivot. It’s the same mission—scaled up—and I am only getting more ambitious.