Most high school athletes go on to college and never play a collegiate sport. Maybe it was because they didn’t get an offer, or they just realize that they wanted to do something else with their lives. But leaving high school doesn’t mean an athlete has to stop playing his or her favorite sport.
Amelia Blankenship, captain of the club tennis team and a senior in chemistry, continued to play tennis after high school.
“I played high school tennis for four years and I had a lot of friends from my county on the tennis team when I came here to State and I just started with it,” she said.
“I wanted to have a leadership role so I help run it this year.”
Club tennis is the intermediate form of college tennis, one step down of the NCAA, though some of their players are NCAA caliber, according to Blankenship
“You have some commitment, not as much as varsity but not as little as intramural,” she said. “And with club we practice three times a week and we have matches on the weekends but there’s not the strict work ethic that varsity has and we accept any type of level — like beginners can come out and join the team — and we’ve had people who could have played varsity but just could not have the time.”
Coming into her first year, Mary Pritchett, a freshman in engineering, wants to improve her game and build some friendships on the team.
“I guess coming in as a freshman I just want to improve my game and meet new people that I can get along with,” she said. “A lot of people on the team already knew each other so just try to get to know everyone and improve my game and help the team out when we go to nationals.”
An exchange student from Puerto Rico and a junior in biological sciences, Adriana Weil said as a foreign exchange student, she hopes that it doesn’t get in the way of fitting in on the team.
“I guess I wanted to fit in, as in the team completely, not just like oh she the new foreign exchange student,” she said. “It’s hard to explain.”
Stephanie Goss, a junior in chemical engineering who has been playing since halfway into her freshman year, also hopes to improve her game.
“My goal is just general improvement of the game. Since high school, I haven’t really kept up [the] full commitment that I had back then. I think that I’m not really playing to my potential so I really feel like if I come out more and practice, I could help that.”
Lauren Held, a freshman in microbiology who has been playing club tennis for two years, thinks that the competition N.C. State plays is pretty good.
“We challenge everyone in the state for the top title. We’ve played Carolina, Duke and Wilmington and we’ve done pretty well against them generally and I think we’re up there with the best of them, in the state,” she said.
Amanda Nichols, a sophomore in education, also thinks that the club sport goes against good competition.
“As for out of state, we’ve gone to some tournaments [where] we’ve played against UVA and we try to make ourselves competitive throughout the Southeast so that when we do play other teams at nationals, we can be competitive with them,” she said.
