Monday Morning Match Memories

MMMM #5: Bethany Christian vs. Northridge, 2007

As we made the short drive up Middlebury road and pulled into Essenhaus country, I looked into the back of the van and saw what I saw: a team full of underclassmen, only four of whom had seen varsity play. As we pulled into the parking lots and jumped out to play at the Raider new impressive tennis facility, I knew what I knew: we were going to lose.

It had become a time honored tradition at Bethany. We would play Northridge in the first match of the season and come out onto the courts looking as scared as a hamster caught in the dryer. It made me sick. How can you be scared to play a good opponent? You should relish it. I always looked forward to my matches against teams or opponents who were supposed to be better than me. It seemed like those were the matches where I could make a statement. But my teams never shared my sentiment, and in fact the year before this, 2006, I had laid into the team after the match about the attitude of timidity with which they came to play in these matches.

I felt like, despite lacking seniors, this team was different. We had talked repeatedly about our four core values, confidence, smaggression, focus and determination. I felt like that was becoming part of the makeup of this team throughout our preseason practices. But to put it into practice against a perennial Sectional champion would not have been my first choice. I would have liked to start out with our matches that were more winnable, maybe schedule Prairie Heights, Mishawaka, Fremont, Churubusco and then Northridge and the Concord Invitational. It would seem more manageable.

My highest hopes for the match were that we could compete. That is really what I had been asking. Let's go out on the courts and compete to win. If we play confident, we may not win, but we'll give ourselves the chance. So in short, I was looking for attitude, not results. I believe attitude must change first, then work habits have to change, and finally you begin to win. In this match, I figured we would still lose 5-0, I was just hoping that it would be respectable.

That said, those were only my expectations. I was coaching to win. You play to win until you lose, same can be said of coaching. So we went out with a lot of enthusiasm and I was pumped to see us stay close in many of the matches. I believe that Johnny and Jeremy won the first game, as did Daniel and Mikey, as did Jonny at #3 singles. Luke was also managing to stay tight.

At this point I relaxed, after I saw us come out with fire and positive attitude. I still didn't figure we'd win any of the positions, but I was glad we had come to compete. In fact, as the first several games finished up on several of the courts, my focus was on Jared Schwartzentruber. He was playing a freshman, Nick Myers, who was very good. But Jared just didn't get the winning attitude thing. He was getting beat down pretty badly, and began pouting around the courts. I was so ticked, because if you can't get the attitude right, you'll never get the right habits and you'll never compete to win. So I was doing my best to encourage him and not worrying too much about the other positions. They had all already accomplished my goal, the rest was going to be gravy.

My predictions looked to be right on, as Johnny and Jeremy slipped up for a couple of games and Northridge took a 5-2 lead. Daniel and Mikey actually got up 4-1 before they realized what was going on, then they got nervous and lost 5 games in a row to lose the first set. (As I think back on this now, if Mikey and Daniel had won that match in 2007, I wouldn't have been surprised for them to ride the confidence of that win to 18 or 19 wins in the season. I think losing the first set lead made them do some soul searching, and they didn't get their confidence back until Sectional.) Luke competed hard, but lost the first set 6-3. And all of my encouragement was lost on Jared for the moment, and he lost 6-1.

Our bright and shining light though, was Jonny Shenk. Of all the people on the team, I think I sometimes give him the least amount of credit. You know what the difference was between 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 (which were "ehhh..." seasons record-wise) and 2007-2008 (which were "AWESOME" seasons record-wise)? The difference was #3 singles and #2 doubles. Jonny had back to back seasons where he won 16 matches, then 17 matches. That's incredible. Daniel and Mikey get a lot of credit because they won 20 matches this past season, which is also great. But Jonny Shenk was consistently good. And starting with this match in 2007, I think he became a backbone of this team.

He won the first set, 6-2. In the second set, his opponent, Jeremy Runge, got him totally out of his game by bringing him to the net. Jonny competed with ferocity, but lost the set 4-6. In one of my most brilliant and unorthodox coaching moves ever, between sets I asked him if he liked being at the net, and he said no. So I said, don't go anymore. When he tries to bring you to the net, come forward, hit the shot, then run back to the baseline. It worked like a charm. Jonny won the third set 6-0 and we had taken a match from Northridge. If we come with an attitude of confidence to compete, we will put ourselves in a position to win. Jonny's match showed the team that I wasn't bluffing. I felt like it was a huge coaching victory for me.

And then Luke, God bless his heart, decided that he wanted to win to. Determined not to go down without a fight, Luke began playing long, grinding points against Northridge junior Jeff George. And then he started exploiting a weakness, a lack of confidence in his opponent. It was clear that George did not have complete confidence in his backhand, that he didn't want to hit out. So Luke pounded it into his backhand corner over and over and over and over and over and over... Luke fought back to break Jeff's serve twice to keep himself in the match, the won the tiebreaker, then set the emotional tone for the next two seasons with a sliding, epic passing shot to give himself a big lead in the third set.

"C'mon!" he cried, fist pumping and firing up the crowd. He finished off the set and sealed our loss with a huge positive note, 3-2.

I truly believe that this match set the tone for the future by showing three things:
1. We meet challenges with confidence and compete our best.
2. We play with emotion and passion.
3. We play without fear.

I think, if you look through the rest of our matches, when we played well, these three things were true. In our best moments, these three characteristics were an accurate description of our mental character. When we played our worst these things were absent. Let me give you examples, you see if this is true.

Best
Fairfield (S), 2007
Goshen (S), 2007
NorthWood, 2008
Penn, 2008
Fairfield, 2008
NorthWood (S), 2008

Worst
Fairfield, 2007
NorthWood (S), 2007
Concord (1st), 2008
Fairfield (S), 2008

See what I mean. But the tone for a good season was set, and you can see that we played more with these things in the following two years than without. It's a trend I hope continues into our new teams. But thanks Luke and Jonny for the winning notes, and to the rest of the team for taking the right attitude.