Level of preparation separates UNC women's tennis first-year Jessie Aney from the competition

At the end of a long driveway in Rochester, Minnesota, a rebound net the size of a trampoline stands upright.

Chances are if you were looking for Jessie Aney when she was growing up, this is where you’d find her. It’s often where her parents did.

In the dark. All alone. It didn’t matter. She’d stay there – racket in hand – hitting a tennis ball against the net and chasing it down to hit it again.

Three hours a day. The same routine.

Jessie played games to pass the time. She’d see how many balls she could hit in a row — her record was well over 1,000.

When Grand Slam tournaments came around, she’d look at the draw, take someone out of the bracket and put herself in. Then she’d play “matches” against her imaginary competition — needing a certain number of hits in a row to win a point.

Tennis is one of the few sports that places the onus of success on the shoulders of just one person. Where you go is just as far as where you take yourself.

Jessie latched onto this characteristic from a young age. She enjoyed knowing what she was getting out of the sport was exactly what she put into it.

“I can control every aspect,” she said. “I think I’ve always really enjoyed that about sports, that your hard work can pay off, and I think in individual sports I think it’s really amplified, because it’s all you. It’s what you’re doing off the court and on the court.”

The chance to see herself improve led Aney to spend hours at a time by herself, honing her craft in tennis as well as in ice hockey, which she naturally picked up during the winters in Minnesota.

Drive to succeed

Jessie ran up the stairs from the basement and into the kitchen to try and find her father, Tom.

Her hands were bleeding. During the few hours before, she was stationed in the basement, working on her stickhandling.

The friction of the wooden stick rubbed her hands raw, and when she showed Tom, his reaction was one that most parents would have.

“I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh.’ But she just wanted them taped up so she could go back down and stickhandle some more,” he said.

“I was just like, ‘O.K. There’s something wrong with this kid.’”

Much like the net in the driveway, the Aney’s unfinished basement acted as Jessie’s training ground. During the winter months, she spent hours stickhandling and shooting pucks off the concrete floor.

When Jessie came up to get her bloody hands bandaged, she was in the middle of an intense training session. Her older sister, Katie, was going to move to a higher-level hockey team, one that Jessie would probably have to wait a few years to join.

Jessie was only seven years old at the time, but she still spent the better part of her days firing hundreds of pucks into a tarp that Tom had put up in the basement. A few found their places embedded in the basement wall, but the majority peppered the canvas with precision.

Jessie ended up making the team with Katie, and over the next few years the two began to form an impressive tandem on the ice.

“They made each other better and they looked for each other ...” Tom said. “They knew what each other was going to do before they did it.”

While the two were equally imposing in the rink, Jessie began to outpace her sister off of it.

Katie played tennis, too, and quickly realized her younger sister was going to surpass her in ability. She still remembers the last time she beat Jessie.

When Jessie was six years old and Katie was eight, they went to a park in Rochester to play a game. First to 10 points. Win by two.

The game turned into a marathon that Katie eventually came out on top of, 21-19.

“I remember thinking that’s probably the last time I’ll ever beat her,” Katie said. “So I enjoyed the moment.”

Jessie was distraught, as she was every time she lost to her sister. But after she talked to her father, she lightened up considerably.

“I remember my dad said to me, ‘I mean, Jessie, you’re gonna be able to beat her soon,’” she said. “And that made me a little bit happier.”

Over the next few years, Jessie rarely lost to anyone — not just her sister. She quickly became one of the top youth tennis players in the country, and was even named the 2010 Sports Illustrated SportsKid of the Year, the first girl to earn the honor.

That same year, as a seventh grader, Jessie began playing on Century High School’s girls’ tennis team. She advanced to the Minnesota Class AA girls’ singles final, where she lost in three sets to Kelsey Frechette, an 11th grader at Century. In 2011, she came back and won the singles state title at just 13 years old. She was the youngest ever to do so.

When tennis season rolled around the next year, Jessie was the odds-on favorite to repeat as the AA singles champion. She had different ideas, however. She had proved herself on the individual level — now it was time to be part of a team again.

Because of a Minnesota high school rule that said tennis players can only compete in either singles or doubles in a given year, Jessie decided to team up with Katie — then a senior — on the court for the first time.

“Obviously she would have been the forerunner for winning singles again,” said Jessie’s mother, Karen Newcomer. “But she was kind of like, ‘Been there, done that. I want to do something with my sister.’”

Like they did on the ice where they were the top two scorers for Century’s girls’ hockey team — the pair dominated the competition.

At the Minnesota AA doubles tournament in 2012, the two advanced to the title match, where they faced another team of sisters – Edina High School’s Morgan and Mackenzie Marinovich. Jessie and Katie won in straight sets.

A year before, Jessie became a state champion. Now she helped her sister become one, something Katie admitted she never thought she’d achieve.

“That wasn’t something that I would have been able to do in singles or with another doubles partner ...” she said. “Being able to share that experience of winning the state tournament together is something I always look back on.”

The decision to play doubles with her sister was a break from the norm for Jessie, who latched onto tennis because of its individual focus. But when it came time to choose between defending her singles title and helping Katie challenge for a championship of her own, the opportunity to play with her sister for the last time was too good to pass up.

“I was a little bit nervous because I felt that other people would be judging the fact that I would be playing doubles. And it’s usually people who don’t think they can win singles who play doubles,” Jessie said.

“So when we won it was just, it was just such a great feeling that all of the criticism that I had gotten from my decision to play doubles and stuff like that just didn’t even matter. So few siblings get to experience that kind of success together.”

Moving on

Jessie knew before her senior year in high school that it would be her last time playing hockey competitively, but that didn’t prepare her for the wave of emotion that hit when she laced up her skates for the last time.

During Katie’s senior season the previous winter, both her and Jessie scored over 100 points and led Century to its best season in school history.

Jessie still had a productive season her senior year — leading the state in assists (52) and points (96) — but she said it felt weird being on the ice without her sister.

“I remember the first few practices, you felt like she was sick or something like that,” she said. “It was like, ‘Well, she’s not really not on my team.’ Because I had pretty much always played with her my whole hockey career.”

Century had considerably less success during Jessie’s senior year, and limped into the conference playoffs as the No. 6 seed. The team’s first playoff match was against the conference’s No. 3 seed, whom Jessie and her teammates lost to 7-1 during the last game of the regular season.

But Jessie wasn’t quite ready for her hockey career to end just yet. No one expected them to advance, but Century ended up upsetting the No. 3 team in the conference in overtime.

The win gave Jessie hope that her team could make a run in the state playoffs, but it just ended up making things harder to handle when Century lost their next game.

“I remember, just as soon as the buzzer went off, I just couldn’t stop crying,” Jessie said. “I just couldn’t believe that something that I had been doing my entire life had come to an end.”

Newcomer said the feeling that came with losses like this was one of the reasons Jessie decided to drop hockey in order to focus on tennis. It irked Jessie that she could play at the top of her game and her team could still fall short.

“That was frustrating for her that she couldn’t win even though she played her best,” Newcomer said. “In tennis, if you lose and you play your best that’s just the way it is ... And ultimately how good you get isn’t dependent on the team, it’s dependent on you.”

When she finally hung up her skates, Jessie was the all-time leader in assists in the state of Minnesota and tallied 414 points during her high school career. She received scholarship offers from Harvard and Wisconsin to continue playing, but her heart and her mind were always set on playing tennis.

Because the level of competition for tennis was so low in Minnesota, Jessie and her family decided in 2014 the best thing for her would be to graduate early. She had been enrolled in the Minnesota Online High School since the eighth grade, and had accumulated enough credits to make it possible.

In November 2014, Jessie signed her National Letter of Intent to play tennis at North Carolina, and in the fall of 2015 she enrolled at the age of 17.

Jessie said the choice to come to UNC was an easy one. She liked being challenged both mentally and physically by tennis as an individual, but was also interested in testing herself academically.

North Carolina gave her the option to do both.

The next step

In an individual sport like tennis, sometimes a match can be as much between you and yourself as it is between you and your opponent.

Jessie found this out firsthand when she began her first season at UNC.

In the qualifying round of the Riviera/ITA All-American Championships in October, Jessie was slated to face off against Ellen Perez, the No. 29 singles player in the country. Naturally, Jessie started asking her teammates about her opponent.

“I heard about her from other people and they were like, ‘Yeah, she’d be a pro player if she didn’t have all these injuries, but she’s back and she’s healthy now,’” she said.

When Jessie finally stepped out on the court, she had already lost the match in her mind. It took about 25 minutes for Perez to win in straight sets, 6-1, 6-0.

After that showing, Jessie made it a priority to keep having faith in herself, no matter the ranking of her opponent.

“I think you just have to always believe in what you’ve worked on and know that your best can beat their best, no matter what,” she said. “Even if it’s not realistic, you have to believe that somewhere.”

Jessie also made a similar change off the court. Before she came to UNC, she was constantly focused on trying to beat people in every aspect of her life, not just tennis.

When she heard her younger brother did better than her on the ACT, she decided that it might be time to let things like that go.

“I just kind of was like, ‘Well, I just have to kind of accept what I’m good at and what I’m going to pursue in my life, and separate it from what he’s good at and what he’s pursuing in his life,’” she said. “Just kind of making everything else besides my tennis more of a competition between me and myself yesterday, as opposed to between other people.”

As the year has gone on, Jessie has seen the changes she’s made mentally have an impact on her performance on the court. So far in 2015-16, she has accumulated a 34-6 record in singles play and has defeated 14 ranked opponents.

In ACC play, Jessie earned a perfect 13-0 singles record, and in the conference tournament, the first-year won each of her singles matches to help UNC win its first ACC Tournament title since 2011.

“She’s somebody that I’m confident every single match that she’s gonna pull out a win, no matter if she’s playing well, no matter if she’s playing poorly,” said Hayley Carter, Jessie’s teammate at UNC and the No. 1 singles player in the country. “She’s going to do everything she can to beat whoever she’s playing across the net.”

But the story isn’t over just yet. North Carolina continues its NCAA Tournament run against Virginia on Thursday, and Jessie will compete in the NCAA Singles Championships starting on May 25.

She might not have the rebound net or the tarp in the garage anymore, but that hasn’t stopped her from devoting hours of time outside of practice to the sport.

When her teammates took her out to dinner a few weeks ago for her birthday, Jessie took the time to eat a piece of cake, but then decided at 10 p.m. that she wanted to go for a run by herself.

Crazy? She knows you might think that, but in her mind this is what it takes to be successful. She knows she has the chance to become one of the top players in the country, and she’ll endure as much as possible to make that happen.

@jbo_vernon

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