USU tennis player selfless, successful
Courtney Anderson isn’t the type to spew her own stats at anyone who will listen.
She has little to say in the way of sports clichés and strategies. She can’t even identify her best performance of the season.
When it comes to
tennis, all this USU sophomore wants to do is play.
So much so that on a March 15 tennis trip to Hawaii, despite being extremely sick, Anderson paired with teammate Andrea Barker to win the No. 1 spot in doubles action versus Chaminade, helping the Aggies to a 7-0 win.
“The first day we got off the plane I was like, oh my gosh, my throat is killing. I can barely swallow,” Anderson, who spent the first night in bed with a fever and cold sweats, said. “I’m still recovering.”
But she didn’t have much to say about the match the next day.
“All my matches, I can’t remember one from the other,” Anderson said. “I get so into it, I honestly blank out. I don’t even remember the score.
Overcoming illness. Blanking out. It seems that there’s just a little bit of steel in this player.
Head tennis coach Christian Wright said he can see it there too.
“She’s extremely talented,” he said of Anderson. “It just seems to come easy to her. And she’s very coachable, so that makes my job easy.”
Anderson said her relative ease in the sport has been present from the beginning – when she first picked up a racket nine years ago at the suggestion of her mother.
“My mom just got me into it, just to see, and the first tournament I was in I won,” Anderson said. “So that was good, because trophies are cool when you’re little.”
She’s stuck with her winning ways since then, taking the state title when she was at Brighton High School – which she identifies as her proudest moment in tennis – and going 7-3 in singles action this spring.
Anderson says that doubles play, in which she and Barker have gone 5-6 this spring, is more fun, but that she prefers to play singles.
“In doubles, I feel bad if I make a mistake, like I’m letting my partner down,” she said. “In singles I’m just playing for myself.”
Wright said it’s Anderson’s versatility on the team that makes her such an asset for the Aggies.
“She just has a lot of options,” he said. “She can come to the net well, she can stay back and ground stroke really well. If something’s not going very well, she can fix it with relative ease.”
And, he says, she can put her teammates at ease as well with her positive attitude.
“She’s very fun to have on the team,” Wright said. “Her teammates just love her.”
-jenbeasley@cc.usu.edu