Last year, the girls tennis team said good-bye to four amazing seniors. This year, they welcomed 17 new girls, eight of which were not new to S.H.S. The team has now nearly doubled in size.
Back in 2018, Girls Tennis had 60 girls on the team. Girls Tennis had 22 girls in 2021, and the team size went down to 13 the next year. This year, there are now 25 girls on the team. Slowly but surely, they are building their team back up.
The team has a lot of new sophomores who weren’t on the team last year. Sophomore Brielle Boehm “joined because [her] best friend is on the team and [she] wanted to spend time with her. But [she] ended up making a lot of new friends and finding something [she] really [enjoys].”
Another factor that aided in the jump in size was the addition of a tennis team at Challand Middle School. Last year, CMS was able to add co-ed tennis as a spring sport. Five of the new freshman girls on the S.H.S. team participated in CMS Tennis.
Coaches are also happy about the spike in team size. Head Coach Kip Aitken says he’s “really excited” about this year’s size. “We only had 13 girls last year on the team and this year we’re up to 25 and that’s really good for the future because most of them are younger players.”
Of the younger players, four are currently playing varsity. It can be stressful playing other highly skilled players as an underclassman, since most of the time they are put up against older girls. Freshman Fareeda Alkhalaf reflects on joining the varsity team saying that “most of [her] opponents are juniors and seniors and are much bigger than [her].”
A larger team brings excitement and many new opportunities. The team can’t wait to see how many more people join next year and further increase the tennis team.
