Brooklyn Bindas has serious potential as a tennis player and greater potential as a student, so she’s taking the threat of cancellation of her second high school tennis season in stride.
“I’ve been hitting every now and then, hitting with my friends at public courts,” she said. “Some Wareham friends and some kids from up north (travel here) because up north the courts are closed so my friends will come down…”
The Lakeville Athletic Club, where her coach Alex Howard works, is closed. But, while high school student-athletes still don’t know if there will be a spring sports season, Howard’s work with Bindas continues.
“When you’re with a kid, you’re all in. It’s not just a job. At Lakeville, we’re a small club and we treat everyone like family,” said Howard, who worked with Bindas on Monday morning at the Center School courts in Mattapoisett.
“She plays like an 18-year-old. She’s mature, just in terms of shot selection and court sense,” said Howard, noting Bindas’ unusual racquet-head speed for such a young player (she turned 14 on March 28). “If you time the ball correctly, the power is going to be there. Her timing is so impeccable on her ground strokes.
“She still has a learning curve and it’s not always going to be the right decision, but she’s very decisive in what she does.”
In last week’s layout of the high school spring sports season, if public schools return to class on May 4 as scheduled, the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA) canceled the state individual singles and doubles tennis tournaments as part of a program meant to curb mingling for safety. There will be team competition and only for league and sectional championships.
That’s a tough break for a player like Bindas, who had just turned 13 last year when she won four matches in the South individual singles tournament before eventual state finalist Alex Prudente of Notre Dame mowed her down, 6-0, 6-0, in the sectional semi-final.
Compared to her top varsity competition a year ago, Bindas is noticeably stronger and, at 5-foot-6, is now as tall as her father Scott. That also makes her an inch taller than world No. 1 Ash Barty and the same height as perennial contender Simona Halep. Not that she’ll ever play against world elites, but the sport’s height wave won’t hold her back from reaching her own potential.
“She’s lightning-fast… If you hit the ball to her… when you have her running, she does not let a ball bounce twice. That’s self-motivation,” said Howard. “She’s got that free-spirit personality. She knows how to slice; she’ll serve and volley.”
A righty in life and on the court, Bindas wields a Wilson Pro Staff 97L racquet, a popular model among advanced players with fast swings.
“I always work on my serve because it’s always going to be a big part of my game. It’s the one thing you can control in your game,” said Bindas.
“It’s not a weapon yet, but it will be because the mechanics are there. That’s always the last thing to develop,” said Howard, who also coaches Prudente and Hingham’s Lexi Dwyer, two other state-title contenders in eastern Massachusetts.
Howard’s experience coaching those players is only the tip of a career iceberg that tells him there are just certain developmental phases where boys tend to have more wrist snap than girls and can thereby generate more easy power on their serves. With a preoccupation on developing Bindas’ overall abilities, Howard thinks her instincts for the game are rare so he’s tailoring her practices toward developing those assets.
“If you watch a typical training session… it’s 45 minutes of groundstrokes pattern, 10 minutes of crosscourt pattern, down-the-line point play, (but) not a lot of coming into net. I’ve been working on it with Brooklyn,” he said.
The idea isn’t to turn her into Martina Navratilova, but Howard likes Bindas’ hunger to learn difficult shots that can come in handy at crucial points in a big match. “You might have to come into net at 4-all and deuce in the final set and it’s a big point. Brooklyn, I feel like, is ahead of the game,” he said.
The Rochester native comes from a family of student-athletes. Her older sisters Alex (Old Rochester Regional High School class of ‘2013) and Katelyn (ORR ‘2017) played multiple sports in high school.
“Alex likes working on serve plus one and return plus one with me,” said Bindas, who also works with Raynham-based pro Fil Miguel. “They try to teach me how to set up points so I can get to the net.”
Like most area children, Bindas grew up playing soccer and played one year of basketball in elementary school at St. Francis Xavier in Acushnet.
For a couple of years now she has only played tennis, a choice typically frowned upon at such an early age, but general concern that a child lacks a well-rounded life experience doesn’t apply in her case.
As a 12-year-old in 2018, Bindas began attending Wareham High on school choice, splitting her time between attending seventh-grade classes and online classwork at home. She increased her attendance this school year, attending two half days and two full days in the fall semester before attending full time through the current semester until schools were closed on March 13.
Because of Bindas’ background as a homeschooled student, the adjustment to doing her classwork at home has not been difficult.
“It’s just a little bit weird not being able to talk to your teacher, but we’re kind of used to doing a lot of work on our Chromebooks from some classes,” she said. “English, we do all of our writing assignments online and we do all of our worksheets online.”
As an elective, Bindas takes Mythology, watches documentaries, and does her history projects online.
Part of the attraction of Wareham High is the town’s participation in the International Baccalaureate program, the brainchild of post-World War II Swiss educators looking to establish a suitable manner by which the well-traveled children of diplomats could qualify for acceptance to universities.
The organization has evolved and expanded to cover a wider range of age groups. Locally, it offers Wareham High students who qualify on academic merit to choose as high school juniors to take IB classes or enroll in the full, two-year program that shapes the student’s entire curriculum for their final two years of high school.
The most obvious emphasis is on small-group and project-based learning and the absence of a traditional classroom lecture hall setting.
“I’m definitely going to do that,” said Bindas, who at 14 will be too young to start the full IB program next fall. As an eighth-grader age-wise, she currently takes sophomore-level classes at Wareham High. The IB is a two-year commitment, but that will wait. Next year, Bindas will take Advanced Placement courses.
“I definitely want to go into pre-med,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to be a (veterinary doctor) and a pediatrician. Now I just don’t know because there are so many possibilities.”
Bindas has gotten accustomed to a world full of possibilities.
By the start of the month, the United States Tennis Association had not yet canceled the age 16 and 18 nationals in August. The late-June USTA sectional tournaments are still on, but Bindas is “pretty positive it’s going to be canceled.”
But there may yet be a high school team tennis season, and the camaraderie that accompanies that format has brought a new element of joy and pressure that Bindas embraced.
“She’ll play a lower-level tournament that’s not going to do anything for her ranking just so she can play with one of her friends, and I think that’s great,” said Howard. “We have a great time in our private (lessons), but she loves being part of group dynamics.
“I ask her, ‘What do you know about this opponent?’ and she never says, ‘I’ll beat her (by such and such a score).’ She doesn’t take anyone lightly, almost to a fault. You don’t want to over-respect people either.’
Wareham lost only two seniors to 2019 graduation, Ariel Lemieux and Emily Glidden, and figures to give South Coast Conference champion Old Rochester Regional and traditional contender Apponequet another run for the league title.
If Bindas could hit balls with any player she wanted for an hour, she didn’t hesitate an answer: “It has to be Coco Gauff.”
The American sensation from Delray Beach, Florida, now 16, began challenging the top players in the world a year ago and is at the center of a wave of next-generation talents already storming the WTA Tour. Bindas realizes that she is among many young tennis players who would love to rally with the likes of Gauff, so her tennis perspective stays in synch with her academic outlook.
“She’s so smart,” said Howard. “If she stays on this path, she’s going to be a top-notch (NCAA) D1 player. She has the fundamentals and the mindset. Who knows after that.”
The positive experience of acceptance and the making of new friends on her high school team has developed an appetite in Bindas for college tennis assuming it fits her academic pursuits.
“I’d love that,” she said.
By Mick Colageo