new era in tennis begins at seymour

Seymour High School Tennis becomes the fifth sport in the school to start the season this school year with a new head coach.
Kristi Wallen starts her first year as Seymour High School’s tennis coach. She has taught at the school for 10 years and has been the cheerleading coach.
Coach Wallen graduated from ETSU in 1988 where she played tennis. She graduated from Morristown West in 1984 where she played high school tennis. Therefore, she is well qualified to coach tennis at the high school level.
Coach Wallen takes over for the retired James Cotter who was the tennis coach at Seymour High School for many years.
Seymour’s tennis program looks to be a mixture of experience and youth with four seniors on the boy’s team and only one on the girls team, Kelsey Flemming.
The boy’s seniors are Wes Burkart, Joey Snyder, Ian Norwood and Tyler Collier.
Coach Wallen said,” Our boys team will go fairly deep while my girls number one player, Andrea Markowitz  is very good. She takes private lessons and has a good shot at playing college tennis at maybe Carson – Newman. Andrea has very good tennis skills.
“I’m not as familiar with the boys yet to make a fair judgement.”
“We have 8 freshmen out of 18 kids. Boyds Creek Middle school has had a middle school program which has helped our numbers. In the future years I may have to pick and select which is a good problem to have.”
When asked about the IMAC Conference Coach Wallen responded, “ We’ve moved up and I expect some of our matches to be something our kids have never seen before and then there are some matches we should win and do well at.”
When asked about her goals for the boys and girls teams this year, Wallen responded, “ Our goal this year probably would be to learn some good solid strokes and learn consistency which is a big thing in tennis. I’de like my kids to have depth with my 5 and 6 players learning to play tennis so I don’t  have a beginner at the bottom. I’de like to have a full team of veteran players.”
Wallen expounded on the importance of movement on the court. “ A coached child doesn’t  learn movement because they have private lessons and don’t take time to play with each other in doubles, therefore court movement is something I am going to spend time working on. Doubles is a totally different game and that’s half of our points.”
According to Wallen, the team plays challenge matches to decide who plays.
Other players on the boy’s team are juniors Jake Gann and Ashton Hazel and freshmen Mark Danby and Cory Combs.
On the girls side, promising sophomores include Karla Carrodeeguas and Angela Karl, while the fresfmen are Ty Wallen, Alexis Pierce, Laren Troutman, Jessica Galyon, Savannah Goodin and Chelsie Doster.
Coach Wallen concluded, “Tennis is a great sport; one you can play the rest of your life.”
The Seymour Tennis Team’s first match is March 15 at Cock County.