Summer tennis season underway
for two ranked girls

Twelve-year-old Gabriela Demos and 14-year-old Nicole Kantor are top-ranked among young St. Louis area tennis players. But, the paths to those rankings were different and definitely not easy.

Gabriela said her dad started "hitting balls to me when I was four." She's been playing competitive tennis since she was eight. This spring, she earned the No. 1 ranking among local girls her age although she suffered a rotator-cuff injury in February.

That forced her to serve underhanded during matches. She didn't get back to her regular overhand serve until the Missouri Valley Super One tournament in June.

For Nicole, the problem of improving her game wasn't physical. It was motivational. She started playing tennis when she was six but she dropped out for awhile.

Nicole said, "I really wasn't trying. I didn't want to work that hard to really improve."

Nicole Kantor

But, when she was nine, Nicole entered a tournament. "I did pretty well," she said. That triggered a renewed interest that led to her No. 1 ranking. She's already qualified for the Super National clay and hard-court tournaments.

She'll be in the clay tournament at Plantation, Fla., July 17-24, and in the hard-court tournament in College Park, Ga., Aug. 3-9.

(To learn more about St. Louis junior tennis, visit www.usta.com/missourivalley)

Gabriela won't be playing in the nationals this year because she had her injury at the time of the qualifying tournaments.

Both girls would like to play professional tennis and are working hard toward those goals.

Gabriela earned high rankings in California, where her family lived before moving to Missouri in 2000. She is now taking lessons from pro Mac McDonald. A lot of her practice sessions are designed to increase agility, speed and strength.

Also, many of her practice matches are against boys and older players.

Gabriela is only 4'10" and weighs just 72 pounds. But, a strength of her game is hitting ground strokes "pretty hard." She's also can retrieve opponents shots all over the court.

She's waiting for her growth spurt to help her gain the strength and power she'll need to advance as she gets older. She thinks she'll be 5'7" or 5'9" when fully grown.

Gabriela said one of her favorite tennis experiences occurred at a pro tennis tournament in Oklahoma City. She participated in a "return contest" where people from the audience tried to return serves from a pro player.

"I was the last one standing from the 25 who started," she said.

Another favorite experience was in a Florida Easter Classic tournament where she competed against players attending the state's famed tennis academies. Her victory was especially satisfying because she was serving underhanded because of her shoulder injury.

Her goal this year is to reach at least a No. 3 ranking in the Missouri Valley. Then, longer-term, she'd like to be able to go on the pro tour after finishing high school. She will be a 7th grader at Rockwood Valley Middle School in the fall.

Nicole will be an 8th grader this fall at Mary Institute-Country Day School.

She also practices five days a week. About half the practices don't involve playing tennis. She works on weight machines "to build muscle" and also on agility drills. One of them involves high-stepping between rungs on a ladder laying on the ground.

"I need to work on my quickness," she said.

She said one of her tennis strengths is consistency of play. "And, I rarely miss a backhand down the line," she said.

She said her best experience in tennis was playing in her first Super National tournament. She was 11 at the time and competing in the 12-and-under class. "Those older girls were so good I found out where I needed to be," she said.

Nicole said she hopes to be good enough at tennis to qualify for a scholarship at a California university. After college, she'd like to be a pro also.

As Gabriela, Nicole got her initial interest in tennis from her father, Owen. However, he died in 1997 from a brain tumor.

Nicole remembered that her coach at that time would schedule some of her lessons on tennis courts near Barnes-Jewish Hospital. "The nurses would push my dad's bed to the window so he could watch me practice," she said.