January 2007 -- Even with a Harvard education and expertise in international negotiations, Deborah Welsh found that a simple tennis racquet is one of the most effective tools in foreign relations.
When she lived and worked in the former Soviet Union, everyone from neighborhood children to U.S. ambassadors “spoke” the language of the game. “Tennis makes it a small world,” said the recently retired educator and volunteer official with the National Peace Foundation.
“Wherever I went, I used tennis as a vehicle,” said this USPTA Professional 1 member since 1952 and a player who turned professional in 1953 in order to develop her skills as a coach.
During her years in the former Soviet states, “When I wanted to introduce myself to a social group I carried my tennis racquet and I was immediately welcomed,” Welsh said. “They had never met a woman with the kind of tennis background I had. Once I got that introduction I could take it into other elements of society.
“The U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan was a very good tennis player, and he and I played doubles together. Next time when I needed something for my courses he was more likely to give me what I wanted,” said Welsh, who taught university students from the countries of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia how to communicate and resolve conflicts.
“I used the skills I learned from tennis in teaching international negotiation,” she explained. “It’s ingrained in me to look at how the body moves to hit the ball. I taught a lot of reading body language and that’s a carryover from tennis.”
The 77-year-old Welsh was self-employed, developing academic educational programs for Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Her final ($1.4 million) project, implemented through Save the Children, was a Children’s Tolerance Education TV program involving all three countries.
Welsh made the 22-hour flight back home to Pennsylvania last October. Although she describes herself as risk oriented, “It was time for me to get out,” she said. International grant money was drying up for her projects, and she felt the threat of both natural disaster – earthquakes – and war in the Middle East.
Welsh lived and worked in the region called the South Caucasus for the past 10 years. Actually, she spent “quite an adventurous” 20-plus years – on and off – in the former Soviet Union. From 1986 to 1997 she kept obtaining grants and “running back and forth” between the United States and South Caucasus.
Welsh was a senior faculty member at Cambridge College in Cambridge, Mass., from 1989 to 1998, teaching negotiation and conflict management, intercultural communication and other courses.
She also served on the board of the National Peace Foundation in Washington, D.C., for nine years. In the 1990s she turned her attention to developing dialogue between women leaders in countries at war (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia).
Although she is retired now, Welsh still intends to work. She is writing her memoirs with feedback from a top editor in Canada. She also will be helping develop Educators for Social Responsibility in the South Caucasus region. “Whether I go back or not depends on my health,” she said.
Welsh already has begun “a new adventure” – with fewer demands – in Kennett Square, Pa. She has settled in a Quaker (Religious Society of Friends) retirement community where there are new tennis courts, she said excitedly. “I will probably do informal teaching just to get myself out on the court.”
The Religious Society of Friends, a historic peace church, is taking care of her accommodations. Welsh is Quaker educated and spent many years as a teacher, administrator and consultant in the Quaker school system.
Quakers are very free spirits and encourage men as well as women to go out in the world, she said.
In 1981, when her children were out of college, this divorced mother of three set out to earn a graduate degree. She accomplished it in two years, graduating from Harvard with a master’s degree in education.
She had been looking for a job when a Harvard professor asked her to serve on a city of Cambridge Peace Commission. The commission established a Soviet sister city with Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia (now an independent republic like the other countries of the former Soviet Union).
When the delegation traveled to Armenia she realized that her Harvard education would be of use there because her specialty was international negotiation.
In the late 1980s, Armenia’s socioeconomic and political structure was devastated by an earthquake, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a war with Azerbaijan over disputed territory.
In 1997 she moved to Azerbaijan, armed with a Fulbright Scholarship, and taught international negotiations and business ethics at a private university in Baku.
On her first trip to the South Caucasus in 1986, Welsh had spotted a 12-year-old Armenian tennis player named Sargis Sargsian. Nine years later she arranged for him to come to the United States, and he would go on to become a Grand Slam and Davis Cup competitor.
Welsh says tennis has been in her family for quite a while. Her mother, who taught field hockey and basketball at Bryn Mawr College from 1914 to 1917, played the game until she was 80.
Welsh and her sister won the 18-and-Under Bermuda Girls Doubles Championships 70 years ago, when Welsh was only 7 and her sister was 13. “My sister complained to our mother that I hogged all the balls that came down the middle,” she mused.
Her sister, Peggy, was a roommate of Pauline Betz-Addie at Rollins College in the 1940s. Betz-Addie was a frequent visitor to the family home in Pennsylvania.
Welsh’s daughter, Rebecca Chase, was the head coach at Yale in the 1980s and ’90s. Her nephew, Doug Welsh, is a USPTA Master Professional.
The former Deborah Chase founded and served as director of Chase Tennis Camps in the company’s beginning years. She was teaching nearly 100 women each week before she went to Harvard and began traveling. She even taught informally, giving free lessons for friends, while living overseas.
“You can’t get very far away from tennis,” Welsh said. “One does not leave it completely. I love the sociability of it, and I love hitting the ball so people can hit well and feel that lovely satisfaction!”
