The Amann Award

The Amann Award honors the player who has come the farthest after being a beginning player their freshman year. This award is given in honor of Kyle Amann, a player from years ago who played his freshman year without any success. During the summer he worked very hard and made significant improvements and I was projecting him to eventually be a varsity player. Unfortunately, he moved. He would have been part of the 2007 graduating class with Weston Troyer.

But like him, we have two players who deserve this award this year. So I'm giving it to them both. Evan Grimes, who's mother literally called me the day before practice was going to begin, put together a 7-4 record on the varsity this season. That's a far call from the 8-15 record that he put up in his first two JV seasons, as he slowly learned the game. This year, he made a huge leap forward by actually taking lessons and committing himself to the game. What I'm excited about is that if he commits himself again this offseason, he may make the complete change from awkward beginner to dominant senior. We've never really seen that before, the closest being Jonny Shenk.

On the JV, Joel Gerig began this season as a beginner, more or less. A couple of middle school matches, a couple of open courts, but no real training. At the beginning of the season, it looked like he might be a train wreck, as he was winning very few of his challenge matches and hitting the ball all over the place.

Slowly but slowly he got better, then he started winning matches. As the JV season went on, Joel piled up matches to the tune of a 9-7 record. Watching him hit at the end of the season, Ben Mast remarked that Joel had probably improved more than anyone else on the team throughout the course of the season. Agreed. So Joel Gerig gets the Amann Award.
As for Kyle Miller, he was deeply involved in encouraging Evan's transformation throughout the last year. He was pushing for Evan to become his doubles partner much of the offseason, which happened twice but they couldn't pull out the wins. Kyle was instrumental in getting Evan to believe, and the "mentality always precedes the reality."