Tennis is making its way back to McKinleyville High School for the first time since 2021 with the hiring of new tennis head coach Washington Vera to help bring the program back.

Vera takes over the dormant program with energy and aspirations for the season that starts over the next couple of weeks. While Vera doesn’t have formal tennis coaching experience and isn’t sure if there’s going to be any players on his roster with competitive tennis experience, he’s still chomping at the bit for the new season.

“It’s been nothing but welcoming from McKinleyville High towards me,” Vera said, he was hired a few months back and has worked around campus spreading the word of the sports’ return at the high school. “They hired me and from that second forward, it’s been nothing but tennis. Creating the buzz inside the school and outside of the school, talking to folks. Putting together all the pieces of the puzzle.”

Vera is a McKinleyville resident who has had his own children go through McKinleyville High. He has spent much time recently playing tennis in tournaments and also in pick-up games against high schoolers he’ll now need to coach against.

“I’m a regular player in the community and I was attending a couple of tournaments recently and I had three separate people come up to me and say ‘You should look into the coaching position at McKinleyville High School.’ I wasn’t aware that the position was even open,” Vera said. “After that third one, I said ‘You know let me just call and see what’s up’ and one thing led to another and they hired me.”

Some of the people who recommended Vera to the position turned out to be fellow H-DNL tennis coaches, something that Vera did not know at the time. It will be an uphill battle for Vera and the program after several years without a team, but the trek uphill starts on Thursday at McKinleyville High with Vera tabling on the campus quad for signups for both the girl’s and boy’s tennis teams, with a second signup day set for Feb. 1 to see how much interest the tennis team will draw.

The season opens Feb. 5, where the first day of try-outs will be held before the games begin later in February. Vera is set to lead both the boy’s and girl’s tennis teams, with the boy’s season in the spring and the girl’s season in the fall.

Despite Vera’s inexperience coaching tennis, he’s undeterred and confident in the ability of the sport to rebound at McKinleyville.

“I just can’t get enough, it’s just growing, it’s just teaching,” Vera said. “I felt pretty confident to put together a team and have them at least grow if not be super competitive with other schools.”

With the Panthers’ not having a tennis team the last two seasons, the chances of McKinleyville fielding a team with much tennis under their belts is unlikely, but that’s something that excites Vera, almost like a ball of clay yet to be formed into a work of art.

“A freshman or a sophomore that never played tennis before that really doesn’t have the hand-eye coordination down very well, I look at them as a perfectly clean slate and so I can plant the fundamental aspects of the movements in them so that they can grow right into becoming a tennis player,” Vera said. “For those that are experienced, obviously I don’t need to start there, I’ll assess where they are and try to fine-tune their game. I look at it as a huge challenge, I’m excited about that challenge.”

Vera didn’t expect or plan to become a high school tennis coach until recently, but now that the opportunity is in front of him he’s jumping in headfirst to help build a foundation of the sport at McKinleyville High for years to come.

“You know you’re in the right spot when you don’t know you’re gathering pieces of a puzzle and all of a sudden you fit a whole bunch of pieces together and you go ‘Wow, I didn’t even realize that was a piece’ that is exactly what is happening,” Vera said. “Over the last two years of playing all these pieces of the puzzle were being created and now they’re all coming together.”

Dylan McNeill can be reached at 707-441-0526.