Woodbridge, a 22-time grand slam champion, came bearing gifts as he handed out more than 70 brand new tennis racquets, courtesy of ANZ and Tennis Australia’s school partnership program.

Woodbridge said it was all part of spreading the word about tennis and attracting more kids to the sport.

“A lot of these kids have no clue what I did, or what my achievements were, so to be able to bring a Wimbledon trophy, Davis Cup and my Olympic medals, they’re learning about my sport, they’re learning about tennis and it’s something that they will go home and talk about,” Woodbridge said.

Visits to South Wagga Public, Lake Albert Public and St Joseph’s Primary was all part of day one of his nationwide tour.

With the battle between sports now as fierce as it ever has been and Woodbridge is happy that tennis now has a program aimed at making the game more accessible to kids.

“The Hotshots program, the beauty of it, and by delivering racquets to schools, is you don’t have to have a full size tennis court,” he said.

“The modified equipment allows these young kids, who probably wouldn’t have the skill set to play with a normal racquet or a normal ball, they can have rallies. You put down a small net and lines, you can put in the gym hall, on the asphalt, in the car park, and they can play.

“So that design of this program is the thing that has now allowed us to attract more kids and get them.

“The biggest thing since I started playing tennis is that kids have so many more options, where we used to just wait for people to play, we’re now getting them started.”

Woodbridge said seeing how kids react to his visits is rewarding.

“The thing for me, is that you get energy from the kids," he said.

“What is truly interesting, out of all the things that I won, the Olympic gold medal is that gets the kids’ eyes to light up.

“That’s really amazing just to watch them and to see how one event resonates with them.”

Woodbridge believes tennis will soon reap the rewards of the focus on grassroots levels.

“One of the things for me, post playing, I’ve worked in the media, I’ve worked at the elite end of the sport, I ran men’s and women’s tennis for three years, but this is an opportunity to get more people playing,” he said.

“In the last four years we’ve had over 200,000 kids signing into the sport, in the last two years we’ve got into the schools with our hotshots program and that’s the key part, we’re now into over 2000 schools.

“Kids like this are getting a racquet.

“At the end of my Australia wide tour, it’s day one of the tour today, at the end of it, I will have given out about 2500 racquets and it will pass 80,000 racquets nationwide in the last two years.”