PARKER — When John Lutaaya was 9 years old, he would step out of his family’s hut in the ghettos of Kampala, Uganda, and walk to the tennis facility more than 3 miles away.

Sometimes he’d have slippers on his feet, but Lutaaya slung a raggedy pair of sneakers over his shoulders as he marched under the blistering morning sun. Shoes can be hard to come by for the poor in Uganda, so they had to be preserved.

“When I get a tennis shoe, I make sure I keep it nice,” Lutaaya said. “You have to treat them nicely, because they are rare in Africa.”

On Tuesday night, at the High Altitude Tennis Academy in Parker, Lutaaya’s tennis shoes, sturdy and free of wear and tear, skipped with grace, kissing the surface of the pristine indoor courts as he slammed shots. Lutaaya is 18 now, a slick, athletic tennis prospect on a pit stop in Colorado that he hopes can turn into a brighter future than the one offered back home.

“If I could succeed in my goal of getting to college, that’d be a huge opportunity,” he said. “I just can’t imagine how happy I’d be.”

Lutaaya is nearing that lofty goal. He has been offered a scholarship to play tennis at Colorado Christian, a world away from the poverty-stricken country he calls home.

There’s just one more test to past first: the daunting SAT.

A game of survival

When Ryan Segelke founded High Altitude Tennis five years ago, he had a vision of building better tennis players at all levels. Moreover, he wanted to provide a helping hand to those reaching for one.

And who needed one more than Lutaaya?

A decade ago, Lutaaya was introduced to tennis in Uganda through an International Tennis Federation development program that aimed to grow the game in impoverished parts of the world.

Lutaaya cherished those long walks to the court, visualizing the smooth, powerful strokes he could employ, ones that seemed to come so naturally.

But many of Lutaaya’s peers couldn’t find a way to keep playing.

“The numbers kept dropping in Ugandan tennis,” Lutaaya said. “Most of my friends had to pull out because they weren’t getting enough food, water, clothes, shoes. It was a disappointment for them. I had to survive, and I just had to keep playing. Sometimes I wouldn’t have shoes. I would play barefoot.”

With participation dwindling, the ITF shuttered its program in Uganda when Lutaaya was 12. He was a rising youth star at that point, well known in Kampala as a tennis prodigy. But it became a struggle just to play.

Lutaaya kept pushing. About a year after the ITF program left Uganda, he earned an opportunity to attend an academy in Nairobi, Kenya, a 12-hour bus ride from Kampala. There, he continued to train and learn English, dreaming of a chance to play tennis in America.

That opportunity came last December, when he earned a scholarship to train at an academy in South Carolina. But funding for Lutaaya ran out after three months, so the academy’s director, Jon Prenelle, reached out to Segelke.

“We were drawn to his story,” Segelke said.

Through the HAT Fund, High Altitude’s charitable arm, the organization raised enough money to grant a scholarship to Lutaaya in March, providing him with food, clothing, boarding at the academy, training and an opportunity to continue pursuing his goal of reaching college.

The staff and players at High Altitude took to Lutaaya immediately, struck by his passion for the game and his constant optimism amid his struggles.

“John’s level of character transfers to how he is as a tennis player,” said Brent Mazza, the lead tennis professional at High Altitude. “He’s incredibly humble. He’s always willing to listen and be coachable. Whatever we tell him to do, he’s going to do it and then some.”

Finding a home

Lutaaya acclimated quickly to Colorado, his game showing marked improvement under expert training.

“Back home, tennis was, ‘Get a ball and hit,’ ” Lutaaya said. “Here,I’m learning the basics, the foundation, the fundamentals.”

John Goodrich, the tennis coach at Colorado Christian, was impressed by what he saw in Lutaaya during a visit to the Lakewood campus, Segelke said, and offered him a scholarship that would cover a large portion of his college costs. It came with a caveat. He would have to reach an 820 score on the math/verbal portion of the SAT to qualify with the NCAA.

Lutaaya is a bright and observant teenager, as quick with a quip as he is with a smile. But he has been forced to re-learn a second language that was difficult to grasp in the first place.

“The process has been tough,” he said. “When I came to the U.S., English changed. It wasn’t the English we were speaking back in Africa. It was so complicated. I had to find some tutors to understand how it worked.”

The Princeton Review, a tutoring service, offered to help prepare him free of charge. His score jumped up 150 points in the spring, but he still fell 30 points short of the requirement.

After heading back to Uganda during the summer, Lutaaya returned to Parker earlier this month to resume his training and his studying. He’ll take the test again in November and December, hopeful he can reach the score he needs and close in on a tennis dream.

Rest assured, he wouldn’t have to walk to the court in slippers.

Nick Kosmider: 303-954-1516, nkosmider@denverpost.com or @nickkosmider