It all began on Sayre Drive in Plainsboro when Lesley Norris — who was then about 6 or 7 years old and was lured by the immaculate condition of her street’s tennis courts and her own curiosity — picked up her first tennis racket and decided to try the sport out.##M:[more]##
Now, a decade and two Mercer County Tournament championship titles later, Norris, at third singles, has blossomed into one of High School South’s most threatening players. Undefeated this season with an individual record of 19-0, Norris, along with the breadth of other talent on the team, including standout freshmen first and singles players Ammu Mandalap and Sahana Jayaraman, led South to the state sectional final. The team fell to East Brunswick, 3-2, last month, even with Norris’s individual victory.
And things can only go up from here, as Norris, a junior, hopes to rise at least one spot in the singles lineup after having spent the past two years at third.
The route to Norris’s success was not typical — playing tennis was not part of some big picture for the future planned out in childhood, nor was she pushed into it by her parents. Rather, her growth into the player she is today literally began on those tennis courts on Sayre Drive, where she has lived her whole life.
“It was something to do in the afternoon with my parents,” Norris said. “I tried out basketball and softball, and I wasn’t very good at them, and tennis was something I was naturally better at.”
“Neither of my parents really know that much about tennis, although they both enjoy watching it,” Norris explains. “It was just something that we did.”
Her father, David, and mother, Linda, own their own medical communications company from their home. Norris was born in Boston, but her parents moved the family immediately to Plainsboro when she was less than a year old. Her parents met while they were both attending Harvard, and both had apartments near each other. One day, they were going to a meeting in the university, both got lost, and they asked each other for directions, Norris explains.
Norris says her family moved to Plainsboro because of the school district’s reputable quality of education, and the Norris family had heard about the district from friends. “Education is really big in my family,” she says.
When she was about nine years old, Norris was out playing in her neighborhood courts with her parents when a coach, noticing her natural ability, approached her and asked her to take private lessons. She has been taking lessons from various instructors at Winning Touch Tennis, located on College Road East, ever since.
And one may be surprised to know that when she entered the seventh grade at the middle school level, the first year students can try out for the team, Norris barely made varsity. But her hard work and talent proved to pay off. The very next year, she shot up to fifth on the team.
As a freshman at South, Norris was on the first doubles team that claimed third place at the Mercer County Tournament, and she has been on the singles squad ever since.
It is Norris’s competitive nature that she says keeps her focused on doing what she needs to do, and it is what has gotten her to where she is today — undefeated on the season. Despite her personal record, and the team’s 18-1 record, “I was disappointed, but I thought we did the best we could,” Norris says about the team’s shortfall in the state tournaments.
Still, the team went through a lineup and coaching change — Carla Crawbuck replaced Jim Giovacchini over the summer and two incoming freshmen took the top singles spots — before the season began. Yet, “we had a really amazing season because we had a bunch of new people coming to our lineup,” Norris added. “We had really good team chemistry.”
While she thinks it would be nice to move up to at least second singles spot next year at the high school, Norris is now also thinking about her future, and definitely wants to play tennis in college. In fact, Norris says she will be visiting a few colleges this month, although she has no particular school in mind yet. Over the summer, she went to a few tennis camps hosted by various colleges, where she got a chance to meet coaches.
Tennis is not her only extracurricular activity — she plays the clarinet and plays piano in the band — but “I know I definitely want to do tennis,” she says. “If it’s not too much of a hassle, I’ll try to do music, but tennis takes the top priority,” Norris added.
Preferring reading, writing, and history over subjects like math and science, Norris is also considering a career in psychology.
Norris says she is glad she was afforded the opportunity to grow up in Plainsboro with its quality tennis facilities available. It also helps that it is a competitive area for the sport, she adds, although she will look into the possibility of heading back up to Boston for college.
