Brian Hall proud of turning Lew-Port into girls tennis powerhouse
· Yahoo Sports
When Brian Hall was 23 years old and fresh out of college at the University of Central Florida, his life changed forever with one innocuous request.
He was sitting at his desk at Waste Technology Services in Niagara Falls, working as a tech service representative, when his boss asked him a simple question; would he be willing to coach his daughter’s basketball team?
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What Hall’s life would look like today if he had said no is impossible to know. But, he said yes and the Lewiston-Porter tennis program is better for it.
The former Lewiston-Porter tennis player started his tennis coaching career in 2010 at Niagara Catholic, where he was an assistant before becoming the head coach of the girls team until the school closed in 2018.
Since then, Hall has been the head coach of the Lew-Port tennis team and has helped the team collect four consecutive Section VI titles and three consecutive Niagara Frontier League titles, putting together a 109-37 career record.
“We’ve done a good job of getting some youth programs going in basketball,” Hall said. “… With tennis, we never really had that, however we have been able to take some good athletes and teach them the game in seventh, eighth and ninth grade and by the time they get to 10th grade they’re able to take a starting position. It’s all about finding good athletes, getting them interested in the sport and teaching the game the right way.”
The work starts in the way that he runs his practices where he splits his team up and has the beginners go against one another and the more experienced players go against one another to try to make practice more even. He is proud of himself and the coaches ability to run what equates to basically two practices at once.
Despite all of the success that he has had, Hall does not feel any pressure to keep the program’s winning ways going. While he is obviously competitive and likes winning, what he is more concentrated on instead is how to continue to develop good kids who can handle a win well and a loss well.
He wants his kids to play with their best effort and if the results do not go their way, it hurts, but it is just part of sports. Though he has not had to deal with a lot of losses, when he thinks about what he is most proud of in his career as the coach, he thinks about how he turned the program from one that was middle of the pack to one that is now a powerhouse.
When he first started with the program, the roster had seven seniors on a nine-person roster and he talked to Lew-Port athletic director Brad Halgash about the future of the program and whether it could continue past that year. But as a teacher at the school, he was able to convince more girls to come out for the team and he had 10 players the next season.
“It’s honestly one of the greatest things I’ve stumbled upon in my high school career,” senior Ellie LaTorre said. “He’s so supportive of everybody on the team and makes you feel like a family when you play for him because when your team is more united and has a better chemistry than you’re more likely to play better and have fun doing it.”
A lesson that Hall teaches his players is to let bad shots go and to immediately forget them and in the words of his father, tennis is great because even if you are struggling and miss eight consecutive shots, you’ve only lost two games and still have plenty of time to recover. It has led him to repeating a quote that LaTorre loves, “we’re not there yet.”
That mindset as well as the way he runs the team has helped have success and dominate the section. His team is a big roster with currently 18 players on the roster because of his no-cut policy, which means they have gotten kids over the years who were cut from the school’s soccer or volleyball teams.
Some of those kids have become key players for the Lancers over the years and it is one of the reasons that Hall believes his teams have won. He said some of the players coming from his basketball team to play for the tennis team have brought a strong level of compete and it helped the team as a whole learn to compete at a high level.
One thing that LaTorre and Chretien agree that Hall does well is that he does not take whatever is happening in his own life onto the court and impact the way he coaches them.
“I love his coaching style,” Chretien said. “I love that no matter the day he has had at work or personally, he always shows up for our players. I’ve seen that throughout every single season. And that just really shows me, obviously, who he is as a coach but as well as a person and that just means even more to me than a coaching perspective honestly.”