Colony tennis club will graduate to varsity sport

PALMER — Colony High School’s Tennis Club is growing.

Two years ago, Colony teachers Susan Brunner and Jane Bulovsky, along with Traci Sanders and Susan Skvorc, started the Mat-Su Tennis Association. With the success of the association, Brunner and Bulovsky were inspired to start a club team for Colony High School students at their home school.

Now in their fourth semester-long season, the club is 20 members strong and has had as many as 32 students participate at one time.

“I think that, because we decided to make it into a legitimate team, that’s what grew our numbers,” Brunner said.

At first, the goal was “just to get kids playing tennis,” Brunner said — if they would come hit a ball around with a friend after school, that would be a success, she and Bulovsky thought. Neither teacher had been too keen on becoming coaches of a varsity sport, as the time commitment was daunting to them.

But not for long. As they watched some of their more consistent club team players develop, Brunner and Bulovsky realized that their effort to bring tennis into the schools needed to be “all about the kids.”

So they went to Colony Activities Director Mike Boyd and asked, “how do we make this a varsity sport?”

The answer was fairly simple. After checking in with the Mat-Su Borough School Board and the Alaska Schools Activities Association, known as ASAA, it was just a matter of time before tennis with a capital ‘T’ hopped onto the Colony High School athletics schedule.

Next fall, the Colony High School tennis team will join Kodiak’s in ASAA Region III competition.

However, with Colony and Kodiak as the only teams in the region, there may not be much of a competitive season until the state tournament, Brunner said. While coaches from Bartlett and Service High Schools in Anchorage have offered to scrimmage the local team next fall (to be their regular season as a varsity sport), she said, chances are they won’t play Kodiak until the day before the state matches begin.

The old Colony tennis courts will need to be in better shape before the team can play outside, too.

“There were once tennis courts at Colony, but they are in extreme disrepair and totally unusable. Weather permitting, we meet at the Palmer community tennis courts to play,” Brunner said in a statement to the school board April 15.

But that doesn’t mean Colony won’t have a chance at state next year.

“I think our coaching has changed a little bit,” Brunner said. “Now that we’re really serious about (the team) and we wanna get kids ready to compete, we’ve turned it up a little bit.”

Brunner said she and Bulovsky have started incorporating strength and agility exercises into their practices, in addition to the honing of basic ball-hitting skills. None of the Colony players has competed in tennis matches before, she said, but several would be ready to play on a competitive court this weekend.

Junior students Bryce Adams, Owen Ballos and Michael Crawford, for example, have demonstrated a relatively high level of skill since they came to the club at the very beginning, Brunner said. Taylor Bruce has been their standout female player of late, and Michael Connor, Frank Urbano and Luke Johnson have recently proven themselves worthy competitors to watch for next fall.

John said he’d played tennis with his family for fun several years ago, but hadn’t been interested in playing competitively until his friends told him about tennis club. They finally convinced him to join this spring, and after just a few weeks, he’s already made plans to play on the varsity team next fall.

“It’s probably the funnest thing I’ve ever done associated with school,” Johnson said.

Johnson used to play football, played baseball as a little kid, and plans to continue his wrestling career after tennis season, but said tennis tops them all — for the coaches, he said, and the training.

Johnson said he’s “hoping to be faster” by the start of wrestling season next year.

In the meantime, he and his teammates — and any other potential tennis players — have the opportunity to increase their skills at a couple clinics and “smash camp” this summer.

The first clinic is May 8, where professional tennis coach and former player Aaron Haines will teach two sessions for high school students. Session one is from 10 a.m. to noon, and session two is from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. To reserve a spot, contact Susan Brunner at susan.brunner@matsuk12.us or Jane Bulovsky at jane.bulovsky@matsuk12.us, or visit matsuk12.us/Domain/4296.

To sign up for “Smash Camp,” visit tennisalaska.com.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.