My Tennistory Part 2

I went to Parkview High School in Lilburn, GA.  While I was a pretty decent player, I wasn't able to make my high school team until my junior year.  My freshman year, I was cut from tryouts after a couple of days and then I was one of the last two cuts my sophomore year.  I kept at it, though and worked my way onto the team as a substitute my junior year.  I remember my first match pretty well.  We were at Heritage High School.  They didn't have a particularly good team.  We were good, so most teams were not so good by comparison.  My dad took off of work and came to the match even though I wasn't scheduled to play.  When our #3 singles player injured his ankle during warm up, Coach Green came over to me and told me I was playing.  I remember asking, "Are you kidding"?  I'm glad he wasn't as that would have been pretty mean.  I was nervous.  I don't think Coach was, though.  Even if I lost, we were going to win the match 4-1 instead of 5-0.  I got down early in the match 5-1, and surprisingly hadn't begun to self-destruct.  I managed to put together a game plan that centered around hitting more balls in the court and came back to win the 1st set in a tie breaker and then won the 2nd set 6-1.  The next day on the announcements at school they played a video clip of my match and Coach gave me the "Big Dawg" award for stepping in for the injured player and winning the match.  Of all of the points of the match that could have been shown to the entire school, roughly 2,000 people got to see me double fault during the 1st set tie breaker.  Nice!

My senior year gets its own paragraph.  I was prepared to be a starter, but we had some freshmen come out that year that I didn't know about and I ended up barely even making the team.  The tryouts that Coach ran were made up of us playing a set against every other player that was trying out.  Then, he'd add the number of games up to get the position on the ladder.  I remember beating one of the guys that ended up getting a top 7 spot 6-2.  After our set, he asked me if we could report the score 6-4 to help him out.  "C'mon, man.  You're already going to make it.  Just help me out."  Because I was kind of pathetic and wanted friends, I did it.  Peer pressure is a tough...especially when you are small and unpopular.  I don't remember the number of games by which I missed the top 7 by, but he ended up making it and I was going to be a substitute for the whole season.  Lucky for me there were some very stupid kids on the team.  One of which was ahead of me on the depth chart.  At one of our first practices after determining the team, two of the guys were expelled for doing a drug deal at practice.  Well, look at that!  A spot just opened up!  So, I ended up playing #2 doubles for the whole season with my new best friend that I lied for.  I don't really remember that much about the season.  I know we had a record of about 9-3 at #2 doubles.  One of the losses was against our rival, Brookwood.  My partner was in with that "in crowd" and quite a few of the students came down to the courts and watched our match.  I felt a little pressure to do well.  I don't remember playing badly, but we lost something like 6-3, 6-2.  Brookwood was tough.   They won the state tournament the next three years after this.  In our region tournament, we did not qualify for the state tournament.  We were the 3rd best team in our region behind Brookwood and Shiloh.  I always liked that tournament, though.  We got to miss a school day to be outside all day watching and playing tennis.  I finally got that varsity athletic letter that I had wanted so badly.  But, I'd be graduating in a couple of months and it wasn't worth the money to purchase a jacket to put it on at that point.  I don't know how impressive that would have been on the Shorter College campus.  I have no idea where that thing is now.

I followed my sister to Shorter College in Rome, GA.  I had gone to the Shorter College tennis camp the two summers previous to my attending the school.  So, the coach knew me and asked me to play on the JV team that he was putting together.  I was pretty excited to be playing college tennis, but when I arrived on campus, I found out that all of the other guys that had been brought in to make up the JV team had decided to go elsewhere to play for the varsity team.  So, I was put on the varsity team and told that I would get some matches in against some of the weaker teams.  I think there were 9 players on the team and the top 7 players were from other countries.  The two Americans were at the bottom.  One day at practice, we had an All-American Showdown!  This would decide...who was the worst player on the team.  It was fairly close, but in the end, I was the loser (6-4, 6-3).  There was nowhere to go but up, right?  Unfortunately, I didn't hang out to find out how good I could get.  I became frustrated with taking my daily beatings at practice and the 3 mile runs at 6:00 AM on M-W-F, so I went to the Coach and respectfully removed myself from the team.  I think Robert (the other American) was disappointed to see me go.  I passed my torch to him for the worst player on the team.  We had a ceremony.  No we didn't, I'm just kidding. That was the fall of 1995 and I think I only played about 5 times from then until I started coaching high school tennis in 2001.

I didn't have Tencap when I was a junior player.  I wish I had.  I had no idea how good I was.  Although I struggled to make my high school team, I am pretty sure that had more to do with the strength of the team I was trying to make than my ability.  I estimate that by the end of my high school years, my rating was likely about a 45.  When I got back to playing tennis after taking those 5 years off, it was probably about a 53.  I caught the fever again!  It was similar to when I was 15 years old.  I wish I hadn't taken that break.  I likely would have had a rating in the 20's if I had been playing tennis on the team for 4 years. 

That'll do it for Part 2.  The exciting conclusion including the birth of Big Fish Tennis will be coming in about a week or so in Part 3.