Thursday Rants

Again, I'm a day behind on all these posts. Sorry to avid followers of the blog.

I've been avoiding this post for a long time, but it's time to come clean:

I don't like competing with soccer for athletes.

Yep, okay, if you know me, you know that I'm not a big fan of conflict. And so I hate entering into these conversations with students who are torn between soccer or tennis. I know that they'd have more fun on the tennis team (:-) But I find it really hard to put any real pressure on them. The truth is, I'd really like to have another big class of incoming freshman athletes for the tennis team.

The truth about tennis is that it is about the third or fourth most important sport at many northern Indiana schools in the fall. It definitely falls behind football and soccer, and at some schools even cross-country is more important. But there are some advantages to this for the Bethany Christian tennis team.

The main advantage is that it allows us to stay competitive with the much bigger schools. Because the best athletes at big schools play football and soccer, the playing field is leveled a bit. Tennis programs have less people to choose from, because so many are playing other sports.

So what it takes to be successful in tennis here at Bethany is easy. It takes one class of athletes to decide they all want to play tennis and want to work at it together. That's why our 2008 team was so successful. 11 people went out for tennis in the 2008-2009 senior class, and by their senior year 8 were still on the team. That allowed for 8 people to go out on a Sunday afternoon to play tennis leisurely during the summer, 8 people to come to open courts and challenge each other, 8 people to encourage one another, and so on and so on. What ended up happening is that they pushed each other right to a Sectional title.

We have talented players this coming season. We just don't have the depth in any one class. And so it is hard for the whole group to get together and push each other to greatness. I hope we do anyways.

But, we need that one big class again. I would love to see a whole class of student-athletes decide for tennis. Tennis camps would be a blast, practices would be a lot of fun, leaders would emerge, tennis videos would be awesome - okay, I'm getting ahead of myself. But we would definitely continue to compete for Sectional titles, and that would be awesome. We want to keep up this tradition.

And so 8th graders, I'm looking at you!