The Lincoln Boys Tennis Team is starting their season with a group of fresh faces.
Head coach Bob Feller has been playing tennis his entire life, playing in both high school and college, continuing on to coach at Lincoln for the last 50 years.
While having such a young team this year, Coach Feller’s goal for this season heavily circulates around teaching the first years how to play the game of tennis.
“We really need to teach a lot of young players just the basics,” Feller explained. “We’ve got at least four guys who have never played tennis before, so we really have to teach them the game. It’s a pretty steep learning curve since we need 10 guys to play varsity. Some of those guys who are first year guys have to be ready to play in a couple of weeks which is a tough goal.”
With the number of new players compared to the number of coaches, Feller has also recruited some of the team’s veteran players to support those with less experience.
The team is currently using three of their older players to help instruct this year.
“They have the most experience on the team, so what we’re doing is using their teammates to help them out, because now they are getting one on one attention for a little while,” Feller said. “We kind of determined that earlier in the year that we would be using our senior veteran players to help out”.
The Lincoln Boys Tennis team will play at Lincoln Park today (April 16th) against the Pulaski Red Raiders.