Monday Morning Match Memories

MMMM #2: Bethany Christian vs. NorthWood, 2006

Wes Klassen, everybody's favorite older brother, didn't play tennis his freshman year at Bethany Christian. His sophomore season he played JV, rather successfully. He had a solid junior season, stepping into the number three singles position and posting a 13-6 record. The only thing that he really lacked was a signature win.

Coming into the 2006 season, we knew that we would have a hard time with NorthWood. They returned 5 of their varsity performers while we only returned two, Wes being one of them. Preston was a sophomore in 2006, and was playing Wes for the first time. Playing Wes for the first time is always a crazy thing, because of his odd looking strokes. Wes always hit with two hands, on forehand and on the backhand. And he was also short and blond and cute (sorry Wes), and it always seemed unlikely that he could hit the ball with any pace.

As Wes and Preston warmed up, it was obvious that even as a younger player, Preston had better strokes. But I was able to identify one weakness for Wes before the start of play. Preston looked like his backhand was the weakest of his strokes. Wes and I convened at the fence for a moment before he began the first set, and made the plan to attack the backhand mercilessly and hope for it to break down. What was convenient was that Preston is left-handed, meaning that his backhand is crosscourt of Wes's forehand. And as I think about it, attacking crosscourt is a much underused strategy.

So that's where we started. Hit the ball with your filthy weird forehand, hit it hard, and do it again and again and again. So little, blond Wes attacked. Crosscourt, crosscourt, crosscourt again. Preston retreated and hit backhand after backhand after backhand.

If you've never seen Wes or Russell's forehand, it is hard to describe. As the match continued, the ball kept kicking up into a sweet spot for Wes and he was crushing the ball. I don't know what gave him the confidence or what gave him the sudden ability. With two hands, he was taking the ball high, up by his shoulders almost driving it into the backhand corner. The image I remember in my mind is like a lumberjack swinging away with his ax at the base of the tree.

Wes didn't win every point. In fact, the first set stayed really, really close. Preston was and is a great player, so he wasn't going to fold just because we found his weakest shot. And he wasn't going to fold just because Wes was hitting well. And besides, his weakest shot was better than 3/4 of the other players that Wes played throughout the year. But little by little, it became evident that he was wearing down.

I've only seen Preston really frustrated one more time in his career, and that was when Luke was able to take the second set tiebreak from him at Sectional. But one of the marks of his incredible maturity in tennis is that he was able to recover from that disappointment against Luke and win the match. His sophomore year I was pretty sure that if Wes could get him to a breaking point, he wouldn't be able to recover.

The match went back and forth until it reached a first set tiebreaker. By the time we went into the tiebreaker, there seemed to be the team match at stake as well. It was obvious that we were going to have a chance to win both of the doubles matches (which we eventually lost in three sets) and this tiebreak gained added pressure as an indicator as to whether we could win the team match or not.

The progression of the first set had been really interesting too. At the beginning, Preston really had no worry that Wes was going to his backhand. He made no effort to run around it or avoid it. As Wes chopped and chopped and chopped, Preston began to make more of an effort to take care of his forehands, attack the net, move around backhands. His game began to show the wear of extra effort. I knew he would gain or lose energy based on the outcome of the tiebreaker, enabling his extra effort or making it even more difficult.

Wes jumped out to an early lead in the breaker. But Preston came back to take a 5-4 lead. Wes played it aggressively-safe (smaggressive?) on the next couple of points, taking big swings but going crosscourt. He forced three errors in a row, and won the tiebreak 7-5.

And then the tree tumbled. With first set in hand, Wes cruised 6-1 in the second. It was a big upset, a big win for Wes over a Sectional rival, and gave us hope as we moved toward that Sectional. We lost both doubles matches in three sets, but it seemed as if we had an opportunity. Wes could beat Preston again, and we could turn the doubles matches around. Of course, it didn't happen that way. But we didn't know that at the time of Wes' victory.

That is one of my favorite memories of Wes, and when he won there was no overt celebration. He just smiled some and shook hands with Preston. Preston was upset (sneak peek, at the Sectional he got his revenge and beat Wes fairly easily), but it had been a match of watching one person get worked down while the other played their best. And everybody needs to play their best once in a while!

FINAL SCORE: Wes Klassen defeats Preston Swain; 7-6 (5), 6-1