He has been given the job of lifting the profile of the sport in the rugby-mad country.
Drew (42), who played senior tennis for Otago from 1990 to 1994, has lived overseas for the past 15 years.
He was talented at tennis and basketball at Logan Park High School.
He was in the school basketball team coached by Carl Dickel and made the national secondary schools final against Church College of Hamilton in 1985.
Drew started playing tennis with his father, Ken, from the age of 5 and joined the Balmacewen Club at 12.
His best performance in New Zealand was to win the Southland Open in 1992.
He studied physical education and science at the University of Otago and then completed a masters degree in sports science at Perth.
Drew worked for Tennis Australia in Perth for five years and then spent the next five years as regional manager for the Lawn Tennis Association in the United Kingdom.
His new job will test his ability because Welsh tennis only has two world-ranked players.
The best is Josh Milton, who is ranked 500th in the world.
He has other problems, too.
"We have a small tennis population of just 12,000 members in our clubs,' Drew said.
"We don't have as many courts as there are in New Zealand."
He has a simple formula for his job and what he wants to be judged on.
"I want to get more people playing the game by improving the club structure and coaching," Drew said.
"The key for producing champions is the early identification of talent."
A key to this is the need to encourage more people to take up coaching.
Drew grew up in a sporting environment and was encouraged by his father to excel at sport.
Ken Drew, the secretary of the Otago Veteran Tennis Association, was talented at tennis and cricket in his youth.
He was a member of the Otago Boys' High School First XI that beat Christ's College by one run in 1955.
Ken was the medium-paced swing bowler who wrecked the Christ's College second innings and gave Otago Boys a dramatic win.
He worked as a research scientist at Invermay.
Brother Geoff (35) was an Otago junior golf representative and a member of the Otago Boys team that played in the World Intercollegiate Golf Championships in the United Kingdom.
He is a post-doctoral research fellow in neuro-physiology at the University of Sydney.
