Six weeks after Domiana Costa was born five years ago, her parents, Dana and Dom, were told by her ophthalmologist that because of their daughter’s limited vision, sports were not in her future.

“The doctor said, ‘She’s never going to play tennis, never going to play baseball or anything else like that,’” Ms. Costa said Saturday. “And now she plays everything.”

Her parents have let her try every sport she wanted, and despite what is technically called “congenital fibrosis of the extra ocular muscles,” Domiana plays t-ball baseball — with visually unimpaired kids — and hockey for blind and visually impaired kids like herself.

While attending the Pittsburgh Penguins-sponsored Blind Ice Hockey program, which uses a larger puck with bearings in it to help the players both see and/or hear the puck better, Ms. Costa — an avid tennis player —had an epiphany.

“I was like, ‘How can I do this for tennis?’” and make tennis adaptive to kids like her daughter.

Her research taught her that there are tennis programs that have evolved for blind or visually impaired players, with national programs in 32 counties, including the United Kingdom.

But there was no such program in the Pittsburgh area, and just a few across the country. The United States Tennis Program, which has other programs for kids in wheelchairs and those with autism, had not yet started a program for the visually impaired.

Ms. Costa discovered that if it was going to get done, she would have to build a program in Pittsburgh from the ground up.

On Saturday, after a year’s work with help from Envision Blind Sports, Slippery Rock University, the Pittsburgh Tennis League and the Highland Park Tennis Club, Ms. Costa and her supporters kicked off what they hope evolves into a full-fledged program with regular matches and maybe a league for the visually impaired.

Just seven players, including Domiana showed up Saturday. But that was by design.

“This is our very first event, so we wanted to keep it small till we figure it out,” said Jen Roth, a member of the board of directors for the Highland Park Tennis Club, for which Ms. Costa is board president.

It took a lot of work to get to Saturday.

Ms. Costa did her research on how to teach tennis to visually impaired players. She spent time with an instructor at the Envision sports camp that is run for a week every summer at Slippery Rock, and she contacted some of the directors of tennis programs in Scotland and Ireland where they have leagues for visually impaired players.

One of the first points she learned is that it would be expensive to buy the kinds of balls those programs use. The balls are made out of foam, which makes them move slower, and have an inner plastic core with BBs in them that rattle so the players can locate the ball. The balls are made in Japan and cost $15 each.

“We had to find a way to get balls that were cheaper,” Ms. Roth said.

Ms. Costa and some other club volunteers got together with 50 Gamma foam balls, plastic golf balls, some tubes of glue and a bunch of BBs, and had an “arts and crafts for tennis night.”

They made 50 balls similar to the $15 balls from Japan that cost a little less than $3 each.

In addition, they made the courts smaller, and lined them with bright yellow tape with string underneath the tape, so that the players could feel where the edges of the court were with their feet.

The balls worked like a charm for participants like Angelo LaFortune, 18, a senior at Brashear High School with limited vision who had never played tennis before, though he has run track, thrown a javelin and a shot put.

As Siao Mei Shick, the president of the Pittsburgh Tennis League, stood just on the other side of the net from Mr. LaFortune, she would toss one of the foam balls at him and say, “Bounce,” just before he would hear its rattle.

Conceding that he “missed a few balls” early on, Mr. LaFortune, an immigrant from Haiti nine years ago who just became a naturalized citizen this summer, said it started to work because “I can feel it and hear it.”

That’s the kind of experience Ms. Costa and her supporters hope to grow well beyond the seven players who showed up Saturday.

Ben Friday, a program specialist with Envision Blind Sports, a 3-year-old nonprofit that grew out the creation of the Slippery Rock sports camp for the visually impaired, said he thinks there are at least 100 kids in the Pittsburgh area who could potentially take part in a visually impaired tennis program.

The Penguins’ Blind Ice Hockey program “is really it” for sports programs for the visually impaired in the region, Mr. Friday said.

“But there could definitely be leagues, whether it’s in tennis or some other sport,” he said. “The challenges are A) funding. And B) finding people to help run it. We could not do what we do [at Envision Blind Sports] without volunteers.”

Ms. Costa is optimistic, though.

She is headed to the United States Tennis Association’s Tennis Center in November in Flushing Meadows, N.Y., to take part in a tennis tournament and she’s hoping to meet with USTA officials to talk about sponsorship for a program here that could grow to become a national program.

Ultimately she wants to see in other visually impaired children what she saw when her own daughter began to participate in sports.

“It’s been huge,” she said. Once Domiana started playing sports “She engaged more with kids. It opened up her verbal ability. And it has opened up her spirit.”

Sean D. Hamill: shamill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2579 or Twitter: @SeanDHamill

First Published: September 1, 2019, 2:10 a.m.