The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
The Easter pictures from Ohio in my family’s Facebook posts were of the winter wonderland variety; my hometown got three inches of snow over the weekend. April snow is not unusual in northwestern Ohio, and my Easter memories run the gamut between lovely spring days playing Jarts in the backyard and an egg hunt when I was maybe 9 or 10 that was thwarted by six inches of new snow overnight. But the April snow I remember best fell in 1980, my senior year in high school. It was really just a dusting, but it was a dusting during my first Port Clinton High School Redskins tennis match.
Words mean things, and I am always cautious about the words I use to describe my time with the high school tennis team. When asked about his band, the Long Beds, author Michael Perry recounts that at one of the group’s early gigs, a fan asked whether Mike played guitar. To which one of his bandmates responded, “Well, he HAS a guitar.” I have indisputable photographic evidence I was ON the tennis team. Whether I PLAYED on that team is somewhat more open to interpretation.
Most of my zany high school adventures were attributable to my buddy Carl, who had a penchant for the absurd, but the tennis debacle was all mine. It started with an offhand comment by my sociology teacher, Russ Leist, who also happened to be the boys’ tennis coach. In class one day, he lamented he might not have enough players to field a team and needed a couple of “warm bodies” to fill out the roster. When I followed up on this, he reiterated that he wasn’t looking for quality, just a couple of guys who “knew how to play” and were “willing to show up.” Of my close friends, I was the only one who was not already on a sports team. Carl played (there’s that word again) football, Jeff was a swimmer and Fred ran cross country. I felt like I wanted to participate in some sport before I graduated, and a tennis coach looking for warm bodies seemed like the perfect opportunity. But I wasn’t willing to go out for the team by myself, so I convinced Carl, Jeff and Fred to join me.
It would be an understatement to say that we put Coach Leist’s “knew how to play” criteria to the test. Cumulatively, we probably had a dozen hours of tennis experience. I owned a (dime store) racquet and occasionally batted the ball back and forth with one of my nephews at Braun Park. I had also taken co-ed individual sports as a gym class and, as a result, had the equivalent of maybe one real lesson before playing a set against a similarly (in)experienced opponent.
In Coach Leist’s defense, I am sure he exhausted every other possibility before letting us join the team, and I am confident that if we had tried to make a complete mockery of the situation, he would have shut us down. But we showed up for every practice, worked hard to improve our (negligible) skills and treated our teammates respectfully. For their part, those teammates treated us with a mixture of bemusement and disdain. Our No. 1 singles player, Doug, was one of the best players in the state. He had lost in the regional finals the previous year and was expected to make the state tournament. The rest of the team ranged from reasonably competent to, well, us.
After a few practice sessions, Coach Leist astutely determined he was in for a long season but gamefully went about coaching us up. He paired me with Carl and Jeff with Fred as doubles teams and taught us about game strategy, which for me was, “stand tall at the net with your racquet up high, and maybe they’ll hit a few out of bounds over your head before they realize you have the reflexes of a drunken sloth.”
Our first match of the season was scheduled for the Tuesday after Easter against Sandusky St. Marys at Battery Park, a waterfront sports complex 30 minutes from my school. When we left Port Clinton, it was a chilly, overcast afternoon, but by the time we reached Battery Park the temperature had dropped to near freezing and the frigid breeze coming off the lake had picked up. Tennis weather, indeed.
By the end of the first set, snow flurries were dancing in the howling winds, and I could no longer feel my extremities. Strangely, our match was competitive. St. Marys won the first set 6-4, but Carl and I had been in every game. By the time we were a couple of games into the second set, a light skrim of snow had accumulated on the less-played-upon parts of the court. That’s when we really should have stopped playing, but boys will be boys, and we slipped and slid our way through that second set, losing 6-3. Carl and I came away from that match believing we had underestimated our abilities and were magically going to be competitive against legitimate high school players. That turned out to be an illusion, as we never won more than a single game in any set over the remainder of the season.
It might have been that the St. Mary’s players were nearly as bad as us, or it might have been the weather. Carl subscribed to a philosophy of tennis he called “it’s still moving.” His sole focus was to get the ball back over the net by whatever means necessary. He didn’t care how he hit it or where it landed or at what speed … just over the net. Under normal tennis conditions, that strategy will get the ball slammed back down your throat on a very regular basis, but on a slippery day with poor visibility and blustery wind, it has its advantages.
One final note before we leave my tennis career behind; you cannot tell from the black and white yearbook photo, but I was fashion-challenged. Our school colors were red and white. Although it wasn’t canon, we occasionally added a little black as a contrast color. But for reasons lost to the sands of time, our tennis uniforms were red, white and blue. Consequently, I thought it would be cool to wear blue athletic shoes and high socks with a ridiculous pattern of thick tri-color stripes at the ankle and thin tricolor stripes at the knee. Some people just should not be allowed to dress themselves.