A woman, holding a tennis racket, looks down at the little girl, short with blond hair and bright blue eyes. The little girl holding her own racket, almost as big as her, in her hands, and she swings it almost falling over with the motion. The woman throws the tennis ball again, and the little girl swings again, smiling gleefully despite the fact that she missed completely. The woman smiles down at the girl. She will grow up to be amazing at this.
Sophomore Morgan Hardin, has just been moved up to the Varsity Tennis team. Just last week, she made her varsity debut against Klein High School, and won her singles match. Morgan has worked very hard to get to varsity, but she doesn’t plan to stop working.
“I go to practice every day that I can,” Hardin said. “Some days I have clubs but I plan on going every day. I think I worked hard on jv and I’m going to continue to work hard on varsity.”
Hardin has been exposed to tennis ever since she was a toddler.
“My grandma plays tennis,” Hardin said. “She’s played tennis for many, many, years so when I was a toddler, I would get a racket and a tennis ball and I would pretend to hit it. I never actually started getting into it until about 6th grade.”
When she got to junior high, she became really focused on her sport.
“I started taking lessons and then I joined our school tennis team and then I just progressively got more passionate about it,” Hardin said.
Only two weeks in, Hardin is also feeling the difference between jv and varsity practices.
“On varsity it’s more like everybody who’s there really wants to be there,” Hardin said. “They are all working their absolute hardest, showing up to practices, doing well, trying hard, dressing out during school.”
Her coach moved her up to varsity for a variety of reasons. One of which was her recent influx of victories.
“This year I started winning a lot of my jv matches and then coach told me, and this is in his own words, ‘we have to move you to varsity to get you losing again’ and then he moved me up to varsity on a game against Klein High,” Hardin said.
Playing on a new team with new people, and being the new person on that team, is a stressful feeling.
“At first when I got moved up, I was kinda scared, because I didn’t really think that I was good enough to play at this level, I didn’t think that I would win, I thought I would lose everything, because that’s what happened to me last year and I felt like ‘Just as I’m getting good, I’m going to have to start all over again’ and that was a little bit frustrating,” Hardin said.
However, her feelings changed after she secured a win in her singles match against Klein High.
“I felt more like I proved myself and I actually get it now and all my hard work paid off,” Hardin said.
She wasn’t always this good though, or this dedicated.
“Last year, I was on JV and I didn’t win any games, literally not a single game except for if they had extras and I would play the backups, the benchwarmers, and I won all those games,” Hardin said. “Coach put me on line two last year and I did bad. Then, over the summer, I got really dedicated, because I have been playing tennis for a while, so I finally decided to get serious and get better, because I thought God gave me this able body that he blessed me with so I need to use it.”
Hardin will continue to put in the work to move up to a higher line on Varsity, all while keeping her love for tennis strong.
“I love the fact that you get to push yourself hard and you get to have goals that are achievable goals; it’s not just like ‘I want to get better’ it’s like ‘I want to win, I want to do better at this specific thing’ and also, I just like the people,” Hardin said. “Tennis people are the best, and I like the coaches and it’s a really fun sport.”
