Silence looms over the tenis court as a new game is about to begin. Picking up her racket to serve, Sanjana Chamarty tosses the ball into the air and swings. Swoosh! The ball goes flying onto the other side. As the other player runs to get the ball, it’s too late, 15-0.
Sanjana Chamarty is a sophomore on the girls’ tennis team at CB South. She has been playing tennis for four years and is on JV. The coaches of the team are Coach Houriet and Coach Paige.
Sanjana plays doubles, and although it rotates a lot, she said, “I mainly played with Shrutika last year.”
If she could choose to play doubles or singles, she would choose doubles because shots are easier to hit with a wider range.
When asked about what made her interested in tennis, she said, “my parents played it, my dad played it a lot when he was a kid, and I’ve just enjoyed bracket sports in general. “She used to take lessons outside of school at Upper Dublin in Doylestown, but no longer does.
“I think I definitely improved a lot more because I played with a lot of experienced players which helped me improve my game overall,” she said. Though she believes she needs to work on her serves.
Sanjana said, “I did a lot better in general,” when she discussed how she played this year.
She expanded on this by saying, “so I think I met a lot more people this year because the freshmen moved up to the team, so I was exposed to a lot more styles and I feel like just making more relationships with people on the team helped so I was a lot more comfortable.”
When discussing the struggles with balancing tennis and school she said, “I guess I’ve just gotten used to it I don’t miss much of school either, but you just have to make the work up on your own time; not much to do though.”
The tryout process is quite interesting because not only does it require playing many matches, but she also says, “a lot of the tryouts is based on how agile you are between rotations of matches, fitness plays into that.” Though the most important thing is, how you play.
During tryouts they do king of the court. This means that whoever wins the match gets to stay at the top of the court, if you lose you go down. But, she is unsure whether or not she will try out for the team next year because she is interested in the biotech program.
The player on the team that Sanjana looks up to the most is Grace Piro the first singles player. It was hard for her to choose just one person she looks up to the most in general, but if she had to, she says Coco Gauff is her biggest inspiration.
The reason is, “she beat her idol when she was just 15 years old and her passion for the sport is something I really admire about her” Sanjana said.
“For our team, what we do each year is, each JV player gets paired with a varsity player and whoever wins gets a tiara,” Sanjana said. This is one of her favorite memories playing on the South team because she got to learn a lot with who she was paired with.
