john branston
Catherine Harrison
The Racquet Club of Memphis has been around for more than 30 years,
and thousands of good tennis players have come through its junior
development programs.
But Peter Lebedevs, who has been a teaching pro at the club since
1983, can count on two hands the ones who made it to even the lowest
level of the pros in the last 25 years.
There was Audra Keller from Bartlett and Susan Gilchrist from
Tuscaloosa, who both won some matches on the pro tour in singles or
doubles. On the men’s side, Keith Evans came within a point of beating
one of the top 10 players in the world. Lewis Smith starred at
Vanderbilt and tried the satellite tour for a month before telling
Lebedevs “this is so hard it’s ridiculous.”
That’s why there’s some buzz this week over 15-year-old Catherine
Harrison from Germantown, who advanced Tuesday to the third round of
the National 18-and-under Clay Court tournament at the Racquet
Club.
After beating the 17th-seeded player, Catherine said she has a
chance to make the finals if she can get past her next match. Her
opponent, who is seeded fourth, beat her last year in a third-set
tiebreaker.
“Last year I completely mentally freaked out when I was up 4-1 in
the tiebreaker,” said Catherine. “I’m a lot stronger mentally now.”
It takes a village and about 10,000 hours of practice to make a
professional athlete.
Catherine started by choosing her parents well. Her father, Kent, is
an executive with International Paper and a competitive runner and
tennis player. Her mother, Jan, is a multi-talented musician and tennis
player who gave up her high school teaching career to advance
Catherine’s career and accompany her to roughly 20 tournaments a year
from coast to coast.
When she was four years old, Catherine started hitting balls with
Racquet Club pro Rob Cadwallader, who would coach her for the next nine
years. She still hits with two hands from both sides, as she did when
she was barely strong enough to hold a racquet.
“She was impatient when she was younger and hit too hard,”
Cadwallader said. “But in the long run that pays off. They start to go
in.”
At 13, she and her mother moved to south Florida where she enrolled
in former touring pro Harold Solomon’s tennis academy. Five days a
week, she did drills for two hours, played matches for two hours, and
worked on conditioning for another hour. Jan says that in a typical
week, Catherine would be on the court for 25 hours. This year they
moved back to Germantown, where Catherine is home schooled and works
out daily with the mens and womens teams at the University of Memphis.
She also has two coaches and a strength trainer. If she does well in
the nationals this week, she’ll have to decide whether she wants to
turn pro next year or settle for some of the estimated $14 million in
college scholarship offers represented by the 74 schools and coaches
attending the event.
“Catherine’s potential is very high, but potential and talent means
you’ve done nothing,” said Lebedevs. “It’s getting harder out there.
Young players are training at the semi-professional level. The European
mentality is that there is no college, you train to go pro.”
With the exception of Florida and California, American training has
not caught up with Europe. Part of the problem is real estate. A
compact nation like France can bring all of its top junior players
together easier than the United States can. European athletes who
aren’t ready for the pros often wind up on American college teams.
“All the college teams are better now,” said Lebedevs, an Australian
who played for Memphis from 1983-1987. “I didn’t start playing until I
was 12 years old. I kind of had to play catch-up, and I never quite
caught up.”
Neither did the rest of us, and that’s why we’re pulling for
Catherine Harrison to live the dream.
