Prior to the season being suspended and ultimately canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mingus Union High School’s boys tennis team looked on track to reach the state tournament for the first time in more than a decade. When the Marauders take the courts next spring, they’ll be led by someone who has experience competing and succeeding in the state tournament for Mingus.
Jake Worseldine was recently brought on to be the head coach of the boys team, replacing Larry Lineberry. Worseldine won a state championship for the Marauders as a player. Since graduating from Mingus in 1995, Worseldine has spent most of his life coaching the sport.
He coached at the Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island for 10 years, served as the director of tennis at the Barnes Tennis Center in Point Loma in San Diego for two-and-a-half years and most recently was coaching in Los Angeles.
“I’m excited to be hired during this time, to have access to eight beautiful courts and plant my seed of bringing tennis fun to all abilities and age levels,” Worseldine said. “I’m just excited to start it.”
While tennis is a spring sport, Worseldine is hoping to get things moving much earlier.
One of his more immediate plans is to start an after-school camp at the Mingus courts. That would include prospective Marauders players but also potential tennis players from other area schools as well as younger players. The camp would potentially start as soon as late-August.
Worseldine’s teaching strategies have developed over his years of coaching. If he’s dealing with beginners, whether it’s a kid or an adult, his first goal is to teach the basic motion. To do that, he’ll start by having the students hit the ball bare hand, doing so with both hands. Once that is done, he’ll move to a racket. It’s a process that he believes can get beginners the basic fundamentals of the sport in less than an hour.
“Kids pick up things easily,” Worseldine said. “My teaching philosophy of making it easy for them to learn — I’ve seen the results over the years. I’m just excited. I want to get these courts filled.”
“My philosophy is less talking, more fun and easy demonstrations so people of all ages can learn the game quickly,” the coach added. “So they’re not thinking, ‘I don’t want to hear you jabber on about my wrist, grips, unit turn, the racket drop.’ It’s rubbish.”
The specifics of Worseldine’s after-school program are still being worked out. One of the issues, naturally, is the ongoing pandemic, which makes any kind of program challenging to run.
But as far as sports go, tennis is relatively low risk.
“In tennis [social distancing] is built in,” Worseldine said. “The only thing is you’re touching the tennis ball. The distancing you’ve got. There’s 80 feet between you. You’re moving around.”
Whenever he is able to get things going, Worseldine hopes to instill the same love for the game that’s meant so much to him in anyone he coaches.
“Tennis is a beautiful game,” Worseldine said. “If you love it, you should have a place to hunker down and have fun with it. Instilling in juniors a stick-to-it attitude, which is massively important, I think. Just keep them coming out.”
