Jonathan Alder Boys tennis had a busy season. With 20 matches, it can get quite time consuming for the players, but the hard work has paid off: the team finished first in their CBC conference, with an overall record of 15-5. Then the team had two doubles teams qualify to the District Tourney. They then moved onto the Sectional Championship where they then advanced once again.
Senior Noah Kuck has played tennis since his sophomore year and began to play because of his friends. “My friends were like ‘hey you should try this out’ and I was like ‘ok’ since I was basically quitting another sport, so I was like ‘why not?’ so that’s how I got into tennis,” he says.
Freshman Elijah Harriman began tennis this year, but had been doing some practices over summer Fridays, which he says helped ease the transition. “Just doing it [tennis practices] on those Fridays kind of made me enjoy it quite a bit,” he says. “I also had a couple of friends who were doing it too, which made me decide to do it.”
Throughout Kuck’s career, he says the teammates have been most memorable. “Being at the matches and watching your friends play, then cheering them on is probably just the best part of tennis.”
For Harriman, the match that is most memorable to him is his first. “My first one against Bellefontaine, it was pretty good. In the last point of it, Bellefontaine kind of got a powerline across the court to the second-to-last point that we had played. It hit that, so we had to play another point after that, which was funny.”
With this being Harriman’s first year through tennis he has already learned some things that are quite important for tennis players.
“The best skill [for tennis] is endurance probably,” says Harriman. “Sometimes you just get locked into a set thinking for over half an hour.”
Photo courtesy of @alderathletics on Instagram
Some advice for beginners from Kuck would be “Learn the basics first. Start easy, then ramp up the difficulty as you go.”
If you’re ever thinking about joining the sport, this is what Kuck would say. “Tennis is a really team-based sport. It is going to be challenging, but it pays off to get to the next level.”
Two doubles groups from Alder, senior Connor Boggs and senior Drew Corbitt and senior Isaac Banks and junior Gideon Sullivan, advanced from the sectional tournament and will play in the District Tournament on Wed, May 15.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story said the team finished 3rd. It has been corrected to the accurate place of 1st. We also had spelled Bellefontaine incorrectly.
