Ted Cooke on Winning and Overcoming the Odds

Ted Cooke might be one of the smallest guys on the tennis team. But that doesn’t matter. He’s always found ways to win. As a tennis player, it takes more than size to win. Cooke hopes that he and his Stevenson teammates have a lot of that attitude this year. GoMustangSports.com caught up with the junior for his take as the season begins…

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GoMustangSports.com: Fill me in a little bit about last season. How did it go for you guys?

Ted Cooke: Last season was pretty tough. We were supposed to get some big new recruits, but that kinda fell through. They switched schools last second. And we lost two or three seniors so that kinda hurt us in our lineup. But I don’t remember the exactly record we had, but I think it was like half and half, half wins, half losses. But yeah, it was tough.

At the beginning of the year, all of the matches were cold as…they were really cold, really windy. It was really bad conditions. We just weren’t used to it and we were losing a lot. But once it started warming up, we all kinda pulled through. We started to work together as a team.

This year is supposed to look a lot better because we are going to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina next week. It’s kind of like the mecca of college tennis. All of the eastern seaboard colleges go there for spring break and we all just play matches against each other. That’s going to help us a lot, getting that extra experience. This year is the first year in two years that we are going to be able to go on spring break, so we are all looking forward to that.

GoMustangSports.com: As far as this year goes, what are your expectations? How good do you think you guys can be?

TC: I think this year, we can definitely place third out of all the teams in our conference. The top two are going to be Salisbury and Mary Washington just because they are so incredibly good. They get all of the good recruits. We can get third which is huge for us because our biggest contenders are York and St. Mary’s and we can beat all of them this year. I think this year is going to be a year where we get above a .500 record. More wins than losses. So, we definitely have high hopes for that.

GoMustangSports.com: What is the best part of tennis for you?

TC: The best part is whether you are having a good or a bad day, you can’t blame anybody else. It’s all on you. You can’t throw in a towel and let somebody else come in and take your place. It’s all on you. You have all of the responsibility. You can learn a lot from that in just your personal life: taking responsibility and just not blaming anybody else besides yourself. And (I also love) the freedom of the sport. We don’t have any umpires. It’s all on us; we make our own calls. If we do make a bad call, then the other guy is going to ream us out for it. It’s all honorable. There is a mutual respect. The best part about it for me is the freedom about it. It’s all on you. You aren’t depending on anybody else. It’s just you out there.

GoMustangSports.com: For yourself, if you had to scout yourself, what would you say your strengths and weaknesses are. And for your weaknesses, what do you do to get better?

TC: I know my main strength is my movement. I’m a small guy so I can get to a lot of balls quickly. I can last longer than most bigger guys just because I’m small. I’d say my biggest weakness right now is just power. I have trouble hitting against the huge hitters just because I’m a smaller guy and I’m not used to just pounding the ball as hard as they do. But I have been working on it and usually I can beat them just by keeping the ball back in play and they get pissed off, “This guy’s not dying!” and then they wind up hitting it out. That’s my weakness right now, just power.

GoMustangSports.com: Can you talk about your fall and spring seasons?

TC: The spring season is our big season, but in the fall we have one month of practice. After that month, we have the ITAs, which is the big tennis tournament that seeds where all of the colleges are at. It tests the players to see where they stand. It’s just a month of practice and then the big, fall tournament.

GoMustangSports.com: How did you get started playing tennis?

TC: I actually started when I was 14 years old. I just played with my dad. We went out to Wal-Mart and got $12 rackets and just went out on the court and played. I liked it so much that I tried out for the tennis team. Our tennis team was (really bad). We just had four courts and they had cracks in them. We just did it for fun, which was cool. But I liked it so much that my dad was able to buy me tennis lessons. I was really grateful for that because you need to have someone teach you how to play. If you want to improve, you need to know how to improve. You can’t just go out here and expect to get better. You need to know all of the tricks to get better. So I was 14. When I turned 15, I got lessons and then I just took off from there.

GoMustangSports.com: You said earlier when you are having a bad day, you can’t blame anybody but yourself. Is that what helped you fall in love with the game?

TC: At the time, I didn’t even really understand it that well. The only reason I kept playing was that I was somewhat decent at it. It’s a sport that I am somewhat decent at and so I was like “Okay, I will keep doing it.” It’s fun; it’s a stress reliever almost. When you’re mad, you can come out and smack a couple of balls around. There’s nothing better than that. It was just fun at the time. It was something to do. It probably wasn’t until once I started playing tournaments that the whole mentality of tennis got to me. It’s just you out there, do your thing, be honorable, people are watching you. That’s when it hit me: this is a good sport.

GoMustangSports.com: Did you always expect to play in college?

TC: When I started playing tennis tournaments, I knew this was something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. College is just the next step above high school. So I was like, “Yeah, I’m definitely going to play for college.” Wherever I went, I was going to try to play. Even if I went to a Division-I school, I was going to try out and if I didn’t make the team, I would just play club tennis and I would be cool with that. It was definitely something that I knew I wanted to do.

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