SANTIAGO, Chile – In the dusty streets of Lo Espejo, one of the outlying districts of Santiago, Chile, where services are lacking and vegetation is scarce, two concrete courts stand as an improbable tennis oasis.
What used to be a small garbage dump on that corner—where gangs once sold drugs—has become the unlikely home of a tennis miracle. Born from a deep desire to escape drug trafficking, police raids, and the normalization of homicides, this project took root in the district ranked third-worst in urban quality of life across the country.
Richard Quintana (43) has spent his entire life building the project he’s led for 22 years. Fundación Futuros para el Tenis is the dream that transformed a neighborhood—and with it, the lives of hundreds of vulnerable children.
But first, it changed its founder.
Quintana escaped the horrors of drug trafficking in Santa Adriana, the streets where he was born and raised. The main base for buying and selling pasta base—a cheap and highly addictive cocaine derivative—was his own home, where he lived until he came of age: “You couldn’t sleep peacefully”.
Quintana’s uncle was the most powerful drug dealer in the neighborhood. A man known for his fighting skills, who spent years trying to convince his nephew that making a living from the drug trade was the only viable path.
“The police were always coming to my house, raiding it. Sometimes they’d come at four in the morning and search me.” he recalls in an interview with CLAY.
In his free time, Richard would play against the wall using a wooden paddle and balls he found at the weekend street market. One day, a man saw him playing and gave him an old racket.
In that same spot where he used to hit balls with his friends, two of his uncles were shot and killed in a drug-related revenge killing
During the time Richard lived there, he counted eleven murders—by gun or knife.
What impacted him the most, he says, was the blood.
“One morning I got up early to go to school, and I found a woman in my kitchen—a family friend, a local criminal—covered in blood. Her face and body were drenched in red. I had to help her wash up in my bathroom. I was 14. The blood left a deep mark on me. But luckily, in a good way—because that was the moment I knew I wanted to get out,” he recalls.
It wasn’t the life he wanted, but there were moments of doubt: “If I get into the drug trade, I know who sells it, how to package it, who the buyers are. My life was meant to be part of that world.”
Another thing that repelled him was seeing the physical and mental state of people who couldn’t escape addiction.
“There was this neighbour, Don Willy, who I loved very much. Even though he was part of that criminal world, every time he saw me he gave me good life advice: ‘A notebook is lighter than a shovel, and a pencil is much more powerful than a pocketknife.’ I’d think, ‘this old fucker is right’. In the end, I realised I wasn’t cut out for that life—I was scared of blood, I didn’t like guns, and I was shaken by how wrecked drug addicts ended up. I started building a mindset that told me I had to be different.”
More of Don Willy’s advice: “He used to say words have more power than anything else. So I started making an effort to speak properly, to avoid using ‘coa’ (Chilean prison slang), to pronounce words fully and improve my vocabulary.”
At 14, Richard began working. He would buy socks and resell them. Earning his own money lifted a burden off his shoulders:
“The bread I ate came from drug money. It weighed on my conscience. If I ate that bread, I felt like I was part of the system.”
Tennis as a tool for education
At 21, having escaped the drug culture, with an engineering degree and a good job, he laid the first stone of the project that today uses tennis as a tool for education He managed to get a net, some balls, and rackets to introduced the sport to a group of kids at a local community center.
“I remember the date clearly—August 28, 2003. We haven’t stopped since,” he says.
“We were all amateur players. We had no methodology or system. We just fed balls to the kids. Then the grandfather of one of the kids gave us some tennis teaching books from the late ’80s. I devoured them. We trained ourselves, self-taught.”
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In 2007, a government program emerged to reclaim public spaces. The neighborhood had been overtaken by violence. A young girl had recently died from a stray bullet.
“There was a big increase in police presence, a lot of repression—everyone on the street was a suspect. I’d leave work and they’d stop me to search me head to toe,” Quintana recalls. Government funds helped the project move to the next step.
In 2014, Chile’s top player at the time joined the foundation, giving the project a new boost.
Hans Podlipnik, a tennis player who reached World No. 157 in singles and won an ATP title and 20 Challenger events in doubles, wanted to get involved long-term in a social project.
He has been the president of Futuros Para el Tenis for eleven years. His face is painted on the facade as a tribute.
“Help really has to be consistent to create a real impact,” believes Podlipnik, who is convinced that tennis clinics or visits just to say hello don’t make a difference.
Dozens of children who have passed through the Futuros Para el Tenis Foundation have graduated from high school and gone on to university. Several of them have earned a university degree. That’s the ultimate goal of the organization led by Quintana and Podlipnik.
“We focus on education. In these areas, when kids come home from school, they have no green spaces or clubs to spend the afternoon. In marginalized areas, there aren’t enough spaces where kids can just be kids. What happens is that they end up playing in the streets, constantly at risk of being recruited by drug dealers or criminal gangs,” reflects Podlipnik.
In 2025, Fundación Futuros Para el Tenis is providing a safe space for 350 children at no cost, not only with tennis courts but also with classrooms, psychologists, and educators.
“It’s been a tremendous success. But it’s a lot of work, and sometimes people don’t understand how difficult this is in a country like Chile. It’s been a heroic effort by Richard. Also Diego’s, and Seba’s, the coaches we have. Being there requires tremendous passion,” Podlipnik tells CLAY
Around 2,000 children have passed through its courts. Several have changed the course of their lives thanks to the tools tennis gave them. Many found the skills to decide that studying and working were the right way to move forward in life. They avoided childhood obesity; gained the confidence to break away from the stigmas they would face in the job market simply for coming from Santa Adriana, a neighborhood with a bad reputation.
They changed their tastes, their friendships, their role models.
Like Diego Contreras, who arrived on the first day of the project, April 28, 2003, at the age of 11. Nowadays he is the foundation’s coach.
Or Dylan Farías, a 17-year-old with a type of paralysis that affects half of his body, who came to the group at the age of 7 to try tennis, and is now one of the best players in Chile in adaptive tennis; or Emilia Tello, who discovered her talent and good physical skills on the courts of Lo Espejo. She was invited to train at private clubs and is now part of another academy. She dreams of earning a scholarship to study and compete in tennis.
Also, the grandson of Don Willy, the “wise old criminal” who used to give Richard advice when he saw him hitting a dirty, fuzzy old ball. A little boy who now joins the programmes of the foundation, starting to open up to a different life, like so many others did.
