Saturday morning, W.F. West tennis coach Jack State set up in his normal spot in a camping chair just outside the fence at the WFW tennis courts, and let his legacy come to him.
State, who started coaching in Chehalis in 1974, is two months away from beginning his 50th season with the Bearcats. Saturday, though, he took a break from teaching up the next generation to welcome back a fair few old faces for the second annual Jack State Alumni Tennis Tournament.
“It’s just to get people out here and playing,” he said. “Most of the people who played here played at W.F. West when they were in high school, and that goes back.”
It goes back quite a ways, to Brian Zylstra, who suited up for the Bearcat boys tennis program when State took over the program decades ago and Saturday teamed up with Derek Eyring, who graduated from W.F. West in 1986.
Not all the faces were old, though, and not all were Bearcats; Olivia Norris, who just finished her playing career at Centralia and graduated this past month, and her older sister Alex were there to represent the Hub City, along with a few other former Tigers.
“That’s one of the things that’s nice about tennis,” State said. “A lot of these kids, they’d go to Thorbeckes and work out together at Thorbeckes, so they’ve become good friends. It’s not always a bitter rivalry between the two schools.”
The two schools also join together under the umbrella of the Lewis County Tennis Association, which had its own significant presence at the W.F. West courts Saturday. Aside from simply bring players together, the tournament served as a fundraiser for the LCTA’s project to build an indoor tennis facility in the county — a project that’s been in the planning stage for years but is starting to get off the ground.
“It seems like it’s been forever that we’ve been starting to do this project, but it’s reached the point where we’re going to start looking to raise the money we need,” State said.
LCTA is set to host two more tournaments over the summer, with one the first week in August and another the second week in September.
