Thorpe Tennis – Thorpe Tennis

Inaugural Cate Winter Junior WTN Tournament Recap

Over the weekend, 52 players competed in the “first-of-its-kind” Cate Winter Junior WTN Tournament at the Cate School in Carpinteria.

The tournament is designed to prepare high schoolers (and aspiring high school players) for the CIF-Southern Section scoring and match style. The format also allows players to improve the reliability of their USTA/ITF “WTN Rating,” the newly emerging standard for comparing player levels across all divisions of tennis.

A total of 111 matches were played, between boys and girls singles and doubles, utilizing the CIF-Southern Section “single-set, deuce+1 scoring format.”

In a nod to World Cup “Futbol” tournament organization, Day 1 featured round-robin groupings of four players, with the top players advancing to a singles single-elimination draw in the afternoon of Day 2. Between the singles action, 8-teams of boys and girls competed in doubles compass draws.

When the dust settled, Cate players had done their school proud, taking victory in all four events, despite facing players from as far north as Atascadero, as far south as Los Angeles, and as far east as Lithuania!

In girls’ singles, sophomore standout Jade Wang was dominant, dropping just 4 games in 5 matches, including a 6-3 finals win over junior Chloe Kalison 6-3 of Villanova High School. The victory follows her win at the Santa Barbara Winter Level 6 USTA Tournament in the G16 division just 5 weeks ago. Sophomore Cate student Elly Edwards also reached the semifinal round, falling 4-6 to Kalison.

Boys’ singles featured a number of exciting matchups on both days, with 3 of the top 4 seeds advancing to the semifinal round. Laguna Blanca junior Oliver Tande pulled off the upset of the tournament over #3 seed Gavin White of Thacher School in the Round of 16, while #5-seeded Lucas Forry of Santa Barbara High School eventually reached the semifinal round with a 6-1 win over Alex Corbo of San Luis Obispo High School.

Cate sophomore Bruce Li proved too much for Forry on the bottom half of the draw, while Cate junior Kakeru Hirofuji took out #1 seed Grantas Pikunas, a highly rated Lithuanian exchange student playing for Dunn School this season.

In the all-Cate finale, Hirofuji’s relentless intensity overcame Li’s length and athleticism, with Hirofuji taking the 6-2 win in what was a reversal of fortunes from the boys’ doubles final earlier in the day.

After three rounds on Sunday morning, the two Cate singles players also found themselves on opposite ends in the finals, with Hirofuji and Forry partnering against Li and fellow Cate sophomore Kendrick Suen. The match-up was close from start to finish, with Li/Suen eventually defeating Hirofuji/Forry 7-5 in a tie-breaker to claim the boys’ doubles trophy.

The girls’ doubles was also a 7-5 tie-break victory, playing out on the next court over within minutes of the boys’ event. Singles players Wang and Edwards of Cate came through the semifinals with a 6-3 win over freshman Ella Osley of Laguna Blanca and 8th grader Keren Monroy. Meanwhile, #1-seeded Cate sophomore/junior combo Ivy Huang and Reyna Takahashi posted a 6-1 victory over their junior teammates Gwendi Rogers and Claire Tang.

In the all-Cate girls’ final, Huang and Takahashi were pushed to the limit, defending a match-point at 5-6, before recovering to win a closely contested tie-breaker.

Not to be left out, Cate’s Kendrick Suen and middle-schooler Hannah George received the tournament honors (and TennisWarehouse gift cards) for their excellent sportsmanship throughout the tournament. In addition to Suen’s doubles title performance, both players went 3-0 in their singles groupings on Day 1, proving that winning and sportsmanship can coexist!

Players and spectators also did an admirable job attempting to finish off all the food from the “surprise” pizza party at lunch-time on Day 2. Only 1 of 10 pies had to be sent off to the Cate School boys’ dorm rooms for immediate disposal.

Big thanks need to go to a number of people who made this event possible: Greg Tebbe at Santa Barbara Tennis Patrons, Wade Ransom at Cate School, Mark Polowczak and Cameron DeAragon on the tournament staff team, Fred Randall for taking photos of the doubles players in action, the Danely family for being the first to sign up when the entry list was empty and lonely, and my wife Maria who put up with me obsessing over making this tournament as good as I could make it.

Thanks also to the players for their efforts and parents for their kindness throughout the weekend. I enjoyed every minute of that tournament and hope you all did, too!

If you’d like to see more of the results for this tournament, visit the Cate Winter Junior WTN Tournament on the USTA website. For Fred’s downloadable photos from the doubles tournament, click here. If you’re already looking forward to the next one, save the dates (May 2-3, 2026) and sign up early for the Cate Spring Junior WTN Tournament.

Draws will be limited to 32 singles players and 8 doubles teams and both doubles draws ended up with alternates in the inaugural edition. Also, early sign-ups mean the tournament director has fewer headaches and more time to plan a fun event!

Trevor Thorpe – Tournament Director

Thorpe Tennis 2025 Year-in-Review

My 17th year living and working as a tennis coach in Santa Barbara is now done-and-dusted. It always shocks me how quickly the time passes and yet how much I manage to squeeze in…this year was no different!

The sporting year began on a personal note, as I got to partner with my doubles partner from college (20 years ago?!) to compete in the Wilson World Tennis Classic L2 35’s Doubles Tournament. We reached the finals, taking wins over a player who reached #1702 on the ATP tour, a former D1 starter (Boise State), and a former D2 starter (UT-Dallas).

Following that tournament, I reached an all-time high USTA national ranking of #20 in my age-group, but highlight was getting to compete with my old buddy Aron in front of our wives and my childhood tennis coach Kurt, in the Palm Springs Area where I grew up!

There was little time for reflection though, as it was immediately back to Santa Barbara to finish up my Cate Winter Training Group. The 2025 edition featured 10 players and continues to grow as a resource for our boarders looking to increase their tennis opportunities during the off-season.

Next up, in was the start of my 16th season coaching at Laguna Blanca. This year, I stepped aside as head coach, ceding the role to my friend Mark Polowczak, who has been helping me with all of my programs over the last few years. As I gradually step back at Laguna, it’s really pleasing for me to see that the program is in good hands.

In 2025, the Owls managed to snag the final playoff spot in the Tri-Valley League, and went on to reach the CIF D5 Quarterfinals. This is the strongest playoff showing since we reached the CIF D4 Semifinals in 2022, and with a young team, it’s also a performance upon which to build in the coming years.

Throughout the summer months, a number of players from the Thorpe Tennis Community competed in USTA junior tournaments, with a particular stand-out being Alex Danely. In 2025, his UTR rating moved from below 4 to 5.3 as he won the Solvang Summer Classic and the Top Seed Tennis Academy Round-Robin, as well as finishing runner-up in the San Luis Obispo Summer Classic.

More recently, Alex partnered with Graham Clinger (another member of the Cate Winter Training Group) to finish runner-up in the Santa Barbara Winter Junior Championships. In that same tournament, another Cate player that I coach, Jade Wang, claimed the girls’ 16’s singles title!

The end of summer brought another personal tennis highlight for me. Most of you know that I compete with and co-captain the “Santa Barbarians” in the Santa Barbara Mens’ Interclub League. Since 2012, we’ve been on the hunt for our first doubles championship, and this year we finally got it!

Partnering with my co-captain Wes Barber’s son Curran Hall, we went 3-0 in the playoffs at line 2, including the title-clinching win against SBTC in the finals. In that match, we competed against a former D1 player and a former D3 nationally-ranked player, both of whom I’d lost matches against in the last year.

The match came down to a 10-pointer in the 3rd set, with the SBTC team going up 8-3 and 9-7 before we fought back to take the final FIVE points. In a prideful moment, I have to say that I hit back-to-back corner aces for the first time in my life and played like a banshee at the net during the tail-end of this tie-breaker. Sometimes, if you believe that you cannot be stopped (and you’ve put in the work), you can summon a moment of tennis invincibility. The body follows the mind, so take care what you think to yourself.

It was an absolute highlight of my tennis life to be able to come through for this Barbarian band of brothers that I love so much…even better to do it while partnered with the Barbarian NextGen, Curran, who carried himself so well throughout this season and was such a valuable member of the team. Also, I got to be taller than his dad (the first guy who invited me into the playing community when I came to Santa Barbara), if only for a moment!

Next up was season 17 coaching girls’ tennis at Cate. We had another exceptionally strong season, going 14-1 overall during the regular season, winning the Tri-Valley League, clinching a playoff berth for the 14th consecutive season (D2), and peaking at #46 of 373 schools in CIF Southern Section. Additionally, junior/sophomore combo Lisa Hasebe and Ivy Huang reached the final 64 doubles teams in individuals and the entire starting lineup went undefeated in TVL league play!

Off the courts, I got the chance to travel quite a bit (shocker, right?). Some highlights were:

Beach-hopping on Kauai and Oahu.

A number of visits to check up on the CasasThorpe Vacation Rentals in Merida and play some padel with local friends like Xavier.

3 visits to Austin, including attending both “SXSW” and “Austin City Limits” festivals.

Backpacking the 40-mile Trans-Catalina Trail in 3 days.

Finally getting to the end of the famous “Angels Landing” hike in Zion National Park.

Completing the “Rim-to-Rim” in 24 hours in Grand Canyon National Park

Completing a “new-to-us” backpacking route with Maria’s daughter Dali in Yosemite National Park

Making our triumphant return to European summer (our long-delayed-by-immigration-paperwork honeymoon), this time spending a week exploring the beaches of Crete and the bazaars of Istanbul.

And ending the year in our beloved Mexico, with visits to a number of areas in Jalisco, including Costalegre and Guadalajara with family for the holidays.

If you’ve made it this far, congrats on being a totally committed member of the Thorpe Tennis Community…and sorry I didn’t manage to shorten this post as much as I shortened my hair throughout the year. Regardless, it remains abundantly clear that this is more than just a tennis business…this is an extended family growing around and learning from this sport we all love. See you in 2026!

-TT

Thorpe Tennis: 2023 Year-in-Review

When I wrote my last year-in-review post in early 2020, I started by mentioning my mini-camp series, which had occurred 7 times in 2019 and was to occur 9 times in 2020. How could I have known that the series would be sidelined by COVID-19 and how much my life would be re-shaped.

In this next section, I used to write how many days I taught tennis during the year and my longest stretch of consecutive days taught (260 and 55 days in 2019, respectively). In 2023, I worked 365 days of the year at my new business, Casas Thorpe (have you ever been called at 3am by a guest who got drunk and locked themselves out of your Airbnb in another country?). However, I still found time to coach 36 different players between private lessons and my two high school teams at Cate and Laguna Blanca across 225 days.

Speaking of those high school teams, much has unfolded in the time since the last review. On the Laguna side, we recovered from two COVID-impacted seasons to reach the CIF D5 Semifinals in 2022 and in 2023 we finished at .500 or better for the 12th consecutive season!

On the girls side, we went just that little bit farther and took the 2023 CIF D3 Championship Title during my 15th season coaching at Cate School. This accomplishment by a very deserving group of young women is something I have hoped for and worked toward for 29 seasons of coaching high school tennis.

I take great pride in what they have achieved. It even fulfills a bit of a missed goal from my own high school career, where in 2005 I captained Palm Springs High School to a perfect 17-0 regular season record, before we suffered a devastating first round loss in the CIF D2 Playoffs. The record for Cate Girls’ Tennis this season, including playoffs? 17-0. Loop closed.

In the 2019 review, I gave a big thanks to Mark Polowczak for his help with my mini-camp series, and here again I owe him some praise. He’s now back from getting his undergrad at Texas Christian University and back in the Thorpe Tennis fold as my assistant at both schools and he played a pivotal role in our CIF Championship win this year.

In my 2019 review, I mentioned some rare personal tennis exploits, having played on clay in Argentina and Colombia for the first time and partnering with my college doubles partner, Aron Ouye, for a run to the semifinals of the Santa Barbara Open.

In 2023, we linked up again for the first time since that tournament to compete in the San Diego City Championships. While we lost to what was essentially the Estonian national team (current D1 players that were ranked 250 and 350 in the world in juniors), we were surprisingly competitive.

After that tournament, I resolved to not go 4 more years between tournaments and even entered a singles tournament for the first time since the Leslie Allen Santa Barbara Open in 2014! At the San Diego Metropolitan Open I played in the 4.5’s division and won three matches before having to default due to schedule conflict with a Cate match.

A few weeks later, my Barbarians summer league teammate Alberto Hernandez and I captured the Santa Barbara City Championships for my first-ever men’s open tournament win.

Alberto and I plan to defend our title in 2024 and Aron and I have our eyes on the Men’s 35-and-over hardcourt nationals in Arizona in April. Maybe I’ll even get the chance to play a tournament or two with Mark this year…I certainly like our chances against any other high school coaching staff!

Outside of tennis, after years of having flights cancelled and then needing to focus on my work in Merida, I finally hit my 50th country visited. Hiking hut-to-hut in Slovenia was a spectacular experience!

Also during that trip, I had the opportunity to visit Sardinia for the first time and return to Rome and Venice for the first time since childhood.

I even managed to tack on a trip to Scotland with my mom, who’d been longing to revisit that part of the world for a few decades. Can confirm, the whiskey is top-shelf, but also really enjoyed the nature!

Closer to home, I managed to survey various Mexican coastlines with my girlfriend, Maria. We spent time in Baja California Sur, Oaxaca, and Jalisco on the west coast, and took a trip up the eastern seaboard from Bacalar to Playa del Carmen.

Finally, I began to wake up from my endurance exercise slumber. Having completed 23 200-mile bike races between 2011-2019, COVID (and then building my new business in Mexico) almost completely derailed that part of my life. I realized recently that riding a bike 4,000 miles per year and doing insane 210 mile/16,500 elevation gain days (Central Coast Double Century) was a part of my identity that most of my current students didn’t even know about!

In 2023, I got back to nature and strenuous, all-day efforts, culminating in a 46.5mi/36hr backpacking effort in the Cascades from Timberline Lodge to Cascade Locks in Oregon (day 1, day 2).

Just a few weeks earlier, I’d been bitten by the bug (literally and figuratively) in the Goat Rocks Wilderness of Washington, where I and a few family members hiked a 37mi/72hr route (day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4).

My uncle Keith got to revisit his 1985 PCT Thru-Hike and pass the torch to my cousin Phil, who will attempt the same hike in 2024. I’ve signed on to do support and hike a few sections of the PCT with Phil, so I suspect we’ll revisit this topic in the 2024 year-in-review!

While my work as owner/operator of Casas Thorpe Vacation Rentals has become my primary job over the last 3 years, it’s my sincere hope that my impact on the Santa Barbara tennis community through Thorpe Tennis will continue indefinitely. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to share what I’ve learned with others through the medium of tennis. I hope to see you all on the courts in 2024!

Santa Barbara City Championships Open Doubles Win!

It’s been 9 years since my last post about a tournament as a player. Since then, I’ve managed to distinguish myself with quite a lot more gray hair and I’ve also had the pleasure of working with hundreds more players on their own games, while mostly ignoring my own.

To be honest, I thought I was done with open-level tennis. Tournament tennis can be brutal and at 36, I’m now well-past the average competitor age for the open division. However, I’m very proud to report that my awesome doubles partner Alberto Hernandez and I have just won the Santa Barbara City Championships.

I got some great practice matches and hits in with Barbarian Tennis teammates Alberto, Petar Jivkov, my Cate assistant coach Mark Polowczak (also a former student!), and my old college doubles partner Aron Ouye. Further, I have had a lot of encouragement from my Cate girls as I wandered back into the wilderness of tournament tennis in recent months. I also received a number of congratulations from parents of current and former students, who saw the result through local media. My cup runneth over.

The Thorpe Tennis Community continues to enrich my experience in more ways than I could have hoped when I started more than 14 years ago. It has given me so many opportunities to share what I’ve learned about tennis and life, and to feel valued and supported. Thanks to everyone who participated and cheered me on…couldn’t have done it without you!

Trevor

Winter Sabbatical Announcement

Dear Thorpe Tennis Community,

I want to let you know that I’ll be taking a “sabbatical” from Thorpe Tennis this winter to focus on other projects. I plan to be away from November 15th until the first week of February (with a few exceptions listed below).

As some of you already know, I’ve got a growing vacation rental business called Casas Thorpe. The project is currently composed of one house here in Santa Barbara and two houses in Merida, Mexico. Later this month, I’ll be adding two more Merida properties to my portfolio for a total of 14 bedrooms under management across five properties.

The early months are crucial for new properties and require my physical presence for redesign and prep work for the Airbnb market. Last summer when I added two properties to the portfolio while trying to maintain my teaching schedule in SB it was truly exhausting! Working 16 hours-a-day is not what most people do when visiting Mexico, but that’s what I did several times in order to be back here teaching with some regularity.

In addition, I am looking to expand to other markets and I have a personal life-goal to improve my Spanish to reach a conversational level. I feel that the rainy months, holidays, and days with the least light are the right time to be away from SB for an extended period and so I ask for your understanding.

After 11 years of being a 7-days-a-week tennis coach and taking breaks basically only when my students did, the 6-week forced layoff I experienced at the beginning of COVID reminded me that I should be intentional with my time and energy when I can control it. Now, a year-and-a-half later, I am continuing to build my ideal life.

What I am definitely not doing is signaling the coming end to my tennis coaching in Santa Barbara because I consider Thorpe Tennis and all of you wonderful people a crucial part of that ideal life. I gave my 20’s and early 30’s to this, but it has given me even more. I love my students. I love my high school teams. I love teaching. I love being part of the growth of other people and being in service to others is a key tenet of my personal ethos.

With that in mind, although I’ll be based in Mexico this winter, I will come back for several short periods to maintain continuity. The dates I’ve already set and for which you may book lessons whenever you’re ready are: November 27-December 1 and January 14-17 (I may add one more period between those two). In particular, I plan to host my traditional Thanksgiving Weekend Group Session on Saturday, November 27th, so mark your calendars!

Warm Regards,

Thorpe Tennis Girls Named Co-Player of the Year for Santa Barbara County

The Santa Barbara Athletic Roundtable has recently announced Carol Cai and Grace Fuss as the co-winners of the “tennis player of the year” award for the 2019-2020 school year.

I’m very excited for Grace and Carol to be receiving the player of the year award as a doubles team. Together, they were a top-16 team in CIF Southern Section this year and were also excellent Co-Captains of our team at Cate.

Thorpe Tennis: 2019 Year-in-Review

This year, the main change at Thorpe Tennis was the development and expansion of mini-camps. The once-yearly Thorpe Tennis Summer Tennis Camp was a much-loved event each June, but was very difficult for me to prepare and run. This spring, I tested a more nimble camp concept, something that would be repeatable on a more regular basis but that included the beloved elements of the more traditional camp I had been organizing.

To my delight, that spring mini-camp was a huge success and we managed to repeat the model six more times throughout the year. By following the ebb-and-flow of the school schedule and other patterns I’ve noticed over the years, I am now able to offer the Thorpe Tennis Mini-Camp Series on nine occasions throughout the year!

I owe a big thank you to Mark Polowczak for his help through the year, both with the mini-camps and also our Sunday Sessions. While he is heading off to college in Texas, he’s already committed to assisting again this summer.

In 2019, I worked on 260 days, including one stretch of 55 consecutive days. I worked with players as young as seven and a few players old enough not to want to be identified by their age! In total, I coached 66 different players during the year, across two high school teams, junior tennis, college tennis, ladies doubles, and competitive age-group mens’ tennis. When I wasn’t working, I was traveling!

My boys’ team at Laguna had a season of growth, after graduating most of the previous year’s starting lineup, but still managed to extend our 50% or better win-loss record to eight consecutive seasons. Having finally made their way into the Tri-Valley League after free-lancing for five years, this group now look primed to make a run at winning that league in 2020.

During the summer, Thorpe Tennis was firing on all cylinders, with mini-camps galore. It was so great to see the progress of players like Caleb Silverberg and George Nicks during that period. In addition, much fun was had, all sorts.

I also had the chance to play some tennis, myself, logging court time in Argentina and Colombia on clay, as well as rekindling my Redlands University partnership with Aron Ouye for the Santa Barbara Open. We made the semifinals of that tournament in doubles, taking out recent grads from the tennis programs at UCSB and Cal Lu in the process.

The fall marked the first time I’ve had a high school team go undefeated. My girls at Cate went 10-0, defeating Santa Barbara, Dos Pueblos, and San Marcos high schools along the way. This was the 10th playoff appearance for Cate Girls’ Tennis in my 11 years coaching at the school and we’ve qualified for the CIF D1 Playoffs in each of the last three seasons.

Another real highlight of the year was the incredible run of senior captains Grace Fuss and Carol Cai in the CIF Individual Doubles Tournament. They repeated as Tri-Valley League Champions (and Carol completed her high school career with four doubles titles in four seasons!), before breezing through three rounds of CIF Regionals. They put in a devastating performance against their first opponents in CIF Sectionals, defeating a top-20 in Southern California team 6-0, 6-1 before their run came to an end in the the Round-of-16.

Both Cai and Fuss are being actively recruited by a number of college tennis programs and I look forward to seeing how their college careers take shape. That said, they’ll be sorely missed on the Cate Mesa. During their four years at Cate, the team went 45-3 (31-0 in league play), en-route to four Tri-Valley League Championships and a place amongst the top-30 teams in Southern California.

I’m as excited as ever to be starting the new year and getting to do it with such a great community of people makes it all the sweeter. Here’s to a new decade full of tennis!

– Coach Thorpe

Thorpe Tennis: 2018 Year-in-Review

This post is coming a little later than my typical annual review, but there was no shortage of great things to write about.

As I looked back at last year’s review, I noticed a trend. It’s actually something I think about often. Tennis, and specifically the Thorpe Tennis community, returns every effort I give, with interest.

In 2018, I worked on 258 days, including one stretch of 51 consecutive days. I loved almost every minute of it. That’s not to say there aren’t difficult moments, but every time I step on-court I am filled with a passion for what we can do together to grow as players and as people.

This last spring, Laguna Blanca Boys’ Tennis rewarded me with my 100th win in 9 seasons as their head coach. We graduated a class that went 52-12 in four years of regular season play and reached the CIF D4 Quarterfinals in each of their last two seasons.

The summer was filled with several blocks of group training weeks, where players got 2-4 hours in per day and made some big gains. I also did many hitting lessons this summer, with students of all ages. Of particular satisfaction was the time spent continuing to improve the tennis of some recent graduates of my high school programs (Conrad Perry, I’m looking at you!).

Also, this summer, I had the pleasure of preparing a special group of incoming freshmen girls for high school tennis. Madeleine Nicks, Ava Rice, Amara Murphy, and Lauren Neubauer all put in big time over the summer to hit the ground running at Laguna Blanca. While I don’t coach that team, I am very excited to see what that core unit can do in the coming years and love that I get to be part of it.

Speaking of girls’ high school tennis, when I think about the program that we’ve developed together at the Cate School, it always gets me fired up. This year, Cate Girls’ Tennis went 12-1 during regular season play and put in a solid effort against eventual CIF D1 Champions, Mira Costa, in the playoffs.

During this period, my girls also helped me to reach the 100-win mark across 10 seasons coaching at Cate. Cate Girls’ Tennis has been utterly dominant in Tri-Valley League play, as well as fielding some of the best players in CIF Individuals year after year.

One of the biggest revelations of the year was the progress I got to make with one of my most dedicated students, Jake Gidney. Over the last year, Jake has improved by leaps and bounds through his commitment to being a better tennis player every day. He’s now wading into tournament play and is quite comfortable playing with players several years older than him. Keep an eye on that kid 😉

Part of the reason players like Jake get to reach new levels and play against stronger competition is that Thorpe Tennis has such a great participation rate with group sessions.

I have been working to expand these groups to offer players the opportunity to 1) play more often 2) play with different opponents at different levels 3) have a ton of fun! We had some absolutely ridiculous moments in 2018, let me tell you.

All of this is to say, I feel very honored to be a coach and a role model to this wonderful group of people. I get so much positive feedback and support from my students and their families. I am filled with the joy of passing on my knowledge and just being part of the process. This motivates me daily to improve what I have to offer as a coach and to reach my full potential as a human being. This is truly a virtuous cycle!

Sincerely,

Coach Trevor

Thorpe Tennis: 2017 Year-in-Review

Laguna Sunday Group Like most of us here in the Santa Barbara Area, 2017 ended on a frustrating note for me. Eleven months of momentum quite literally went up in smoke, as the Thomas Fire ravaged our mountains, threatened our community, and for three weeks made tennis all but impossible.

What it didn’t do is dampen my enthusiasm for the way my students have performed in 2017. Whether the goal was learning to put the ball on the strings consistently or to reach new heights in elite competition, Thorpe Tennis was blessed with big results this last year.

These achievements, which you will read more about below, had a particularly profound effect on the way I was able to process the end of my marriage. Those in this community who were aware of it offered me their heartfelt support and the time I got to spend with each of my students on-court was absolute joy in a time of sadness. I want to express my gratitude to everyone who is a part of Thorpe Tennis for being my guiding light in 2017.

Like a parent recently mentioned to me, referring to the mudslide troubles of this first month of 2018, “this too shall pass.” So onward to the highlights of 2017 and the opportunities that 2018 will surely provide:

Spent more than 1,000 hours on-court, coaching 59 players from age 6 to 54.
Directed a fourth edition of Laguna Blanca Summer Tennis Camp for middle schoolers and incoming freshmen that featured what I consider to be the best T-shirt design yet!
Significantly grew tennis participation at the lower/middle school level at Laguna Blanca, particularly through weekly group lessons.
Coached Laguna Blanca Boys’ High School Tennis to a 13-3 record and our deepest CIF Playoffs run to-date (Quarterfinals of D4).
Led Cate Girls’ Tennis to a 13-1 regular season record and a third-consecutive Tri-Valley League Title. This also coincided with our promotion to the top division in Southern California. Being a D1 CIF tennis team means that we are considered one of the top 30 teams in what is widely considered the deepest high school section in the entire country. We are, by far, the smallest school to appear in CIF Division 1 and the first team of any sport to reach the top division at Cate.
Individually, my students at Cate had another phenomenal run:
- Grace Fuss finished Runner-Up in Tri-Valley League Singles for a second consecutive season while earning team MVP honors.
- Sarah Polowczak and Janice Ng had awesome seasons with other partners before pairing to finish Runner-Up in league (l. to sisters Cai). The pair continued their success with a first-round win in CIF Individuals.
- Jackie Cai & Carol Cai repeated their Tri-Valley League Doubles Title and won four rounds in CIF Individuals, earning them the billing as one of the top 16 doubles teams in CIF Southern Section!

Now it’s time to get back to work, Thorpe Tennis players, parents, and friends! We’ve got quite the year to top, but somehow we manage to do it again and again.

Sincerest thanks for another great year of tennis in Santa Barbara!

Trevor Thorpe

Laguna Blanca Summer Tennis Camp 2017 Recap!

All-Camp Photo Year #4 is in the books over at Laguna Blanca Summer Tennis Camp and I am proud to report another excellent week of tennis.

A dozen campers, three celebrity players, and your camp coaching staff enjoyed warm but pleasant conditions at Furukawa Tennis Gardens, with a smattering of fog to provide some sun relief.

During the week, we worked on becoming confident in tie-break situations, learned the high school format scoring system, and did many of the drills that have guided Laguna Blanca Boys’ Tennis to a 62-19 record over the last five seasons.

In the week-long team competition, Team Berkshire Hathaway held a steady lead throughout the week, although Team LaJuJuMaHaBen made a final day push to make the final score a very close 13-12 win for what we can only assume would be the Oracle of Omaha’s favorite pick for top tennis team.

While all campers exhibited good sportsmanship and drive throughout the week, several stood out as being worthy of our end-of-camp awards. Jake Gidney was the unanimous pick for “Coaches’ Award”, bestowed upon the camper that best embodied the characteristics desired in a player by coaches. Jack Connor snagged the “Most Improved” honors, transitioning from squash phenom to competitive tennis player in one week flat. Finally, the “Most Valuable Player” title went to Luke Williams, who showed himself not only to be the strongest player at camp, but also to be a great leader and teammate.

Thanks go to Laguna Blanca School for allowing me to host this event at Furukawa Tennis Gardens; to Tristan Prinz who has been a coach at each of the four editions of this camp; to Henry Farrell for stepping up from “celeb player” to coach in the summer before he departs for Harvard University; and to Jason Barnick, Atty Roddick, and Andrew Tolles for the volunteer work as this year’s celebrity players.

And of course, I want to thank our campers and camp parents for putting your faith in me to produce a fun and engaging tennis camp!

– Trevor, Your Santa Barbara Area Tennis Coach

At the Benches Ben Backhand Volley Ben v Lucian Celeb Jason High-Five Coach Henry + Campers Coach Tristan Coaches + Jack Coaches Mini-Tennis Doubles Mini-Tennis GvB George + Nicole Smiles Harrison On The Run Harrison Running FH Harrison Serving Henry + Tristan Jack Most Improved Jake + Ben Dubs Champs Kate Volley Lucian Forehand Volley Luke + George Dubs luke FH Volley Luke High-Five Luke Slice BH Matt + Jake Action Matt Ready Nic FH Nicole Volley Ryan + Nic Dubs Ryan StringJob Sneaky Shot Boys All-Camp Candid