Proud Of Our Alumni!

Dear ATA,

My freshman year is racing by and it is now April! It seems like just yesterday I was starting the academy experience as a seventh grader, and now I am almost a sophomore in college.(Well, not according to the number of hours I've taken, but at least in my mind)

College life has been incredibly awesome and incredibly demanding at the same time. To be a scholar athlete, as we have all heard this being stressed at ATA a number of times, you have to manage your time, work incredibly hard, and try to have fun at the same time. To give everybody a little bit of background, I am in the business college at the University of Illinois and I am also on the Men's Tennis Team. First of all, to be a successful college student without being on an athletic team, you have to be disciplined and organized. There are many distractions that try to pull you away from your goals, and you have to overcome these distractions on a daily basis.

Whether it's the television, the XBOX or PS2, your friends(sometimes your friends can influence your decisions in a negative manner), your roommate who doesn't go to bed until 3 in the morning, or that party that you really want to go to even though you have early morning workout the next day, these are some of the distractions that you face in college. As middle schoolers and high schoolers, you face many of these same distractions on a daily basis. Now, when you add being on the Men's tennis team to being a university student, you find yourself spending twice as much time on the tennis court as you do in the classroom. Now you have to balance your weight sessions, lessons, practices, class, homework, study hall, dual matches, tournaments, and being a normal person.

Not only do you have to balance these things, but you have to work harder than you have ever worked before if you want to even consider playing in the lineup. For those of you who aspire to play college tennis, here's a little tip. Your coach sees and hears about everything that you do. If you were out late the night before, he or she knows. If you don't run for that ball, because you don't think that they're watching from four courts down, they're watching. I was lucky enough to have been given some insight into these things before I went to college, so I hope you remember this when you go to college.

I know that so far this has sounded like college is all work and no play, but college is incredibly fun as well. College has so many different things to offer. There are literally 40,000 people on campus who are doing a million different things. Many of these people are just like you and it is easy to make a lot of friends and find your niche in college. There are literally thousands of different student organizations that you can get involved in. There is a different concert or play or athletic event to go to every night of the week. These are the things that you have to do to stay balanced. You have to go out and have fun and experience the college life, otherwise you just might go crazy.

To give you guys an update on how our season is going, we are number two in the country and I believe our record is 13-2. We had a really close match against Baylor where we lost 4-3 in the semis of National Indoors. It came down to the third set of the last match and we almost pulled it out, but we'll get them next time. We just got back from our spring break trip where we beat USC and Stanford, and we lost to Pepperdine who is a tought team. Overall the season is going well, but there is still a lot of work to do. We play our Big Ten rival Ohio State this Sunday and continue on our season long journey. We have eight home matches and fifteen away matches this year, so it is pretty grueling and we are doing a ton of traveling.

Well, that's my advice and update for all at ATA. I hope everything is going well and I know everybody is working hard and improving everyday. Congratulations to the recent success at the Easter Bowl(Gold Balls are sweet), I heard only good things about everybody who played.

Go Fighting Illini!

Brandon