It started humbly enough, as memorable stories often do.
Sarah Click was a freshman at Skyview High School, wondering how to spend her spring, when classmate Catherine Cloakey came up with an idea.
“She said, ‘I’ll play tennis if you do,’ ” Click recalled, seven years later. “I had played a little, hitting balls with my dad or my uncle. That usually ended in frustration because I wasn’t very good.”
The rest, to use a cliché, is history. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Because if you read the headlines, you would think that college athletics are broken beyond repair.
In the past couple weeks, you have witnessed a call for the abolition of athletic scholarships, graft and corruption among the Fiesta Bowl hierarchy, a dreadful men’s basketball championship game, coaches under fire for hiding facts from the NCAA, athlete arrests … You have heard enough to make you fear for the future of intercollegiate sports.
So you decide to give Sarah Click a call, because you need a reminder of what is good about college athletics. Which brings us back to the beginning of the story.
Click went out for tennis as a high school freshman. She ended up earning three letters in the sport — along with four in soccer and three in basketball. She ended up placing fourth in doubles at the state tournament. And somewhere along the way, she decided she wanted to play tennis in college.
“About my junior or senior year, I was starting to get a little burned out on soccer and basketball,” Click said. “But in tennis, I was still improving a lot, there was kind of a freshness to it.”
So Click went to Linfield College, an NCAA Division III school in McMinnville, Ore.
“She didn’t have a ton of experience when she came in as a freshman,” coach Amy Dames Smith said. “She has really developed her understanding of the game. She has become really smart on the tennis court.”
That was to be expected. Because the pertinent number isn’t Click’s 9-4 record in singles this year or her 12-4 record while playing on Linfield’s No. 1 doubles team. No, the pertinent number is this: 3.97, as in Click’s grade-point average while majoring in biology.
“I really, really enjoy what I study, and I think that helps,” Click said. “It makes it easier to put in the effort.”
“She has a very rigorous academic load,” Smith said. “I don’t know how she does it, keeping a very high GPA, being involved with her sorority, being involved on campus, and being committed to her team.”
In short, Click is everything we hope to see in college athletes, a walking, breathing advertisement for the NCAA.
Following graduation next month, she plans to take a year off and apply to medical school. She might pursue a Ph.D. and get involved in research. She might pursue an M.D. and become a physician.
Either way, Click has the world by the tail, and athletics have helped with her grip.
“I would definitely say it has enhanced my education,” she said. “Beyond being in a sport, you learn so many other skills — leadership and teamwork and time management — that carry over to other areas.”
And to think that so much of the story, at least the tennis part, came from such humble beginnings.
Greg Jayne is Sports editor of The Columbian. He can be reached at 360-735-4531, or by e-mail at greg.jayne@columbian.com. To read his blog, go to columbian.com/weblogs/GregJayne
