By Nathan Pace
InkFreeNews
WARSAW — Warsaw High School tennis coach Stacy Lind has been involved in tennis since she was a teenager in high school and now she is coaching her daughter and many area athletes in the sport.
“I can’t imagine my life without tennis. I’m either teaching it, playing it, coaching it or talking about it.” Lind said. “I think tennis falls into a lot of life lessons out on the court. Learning how to stand up for themselves. I feel that tennis is a very classy sport so you are learning how to control your emotions for the most part and yet be very competitive at the same time. It’s all I know I guess.”
Lind coaches her youngest daughter, Addie, a junior at Warsaw. Addie has been undefeated against conference opponents in the tough Northern Lakes Conference for three years.
Of her four children in Addie, Colton, Gage and Trislynn, only Colton and Addie played the sport as she never put pressure on her kids to play tennis too.
“I loved watching my kids do what they love to do,” Lind said. “Our rule in our house is that they didn’t have to play tennis but they had to be involved in something in their school.”
At Warsaw, Lind has coached individual players deep into the postseason tournament. She took her girls team to semistate in 2022.
Lind worked Warsaw Racquet Club for 12 years teaching tennis and is now at the Eastlake Athletic Club in Elkhart. Teaching the sport has been her main job outside of a few years where she focused on raising her children.
Her love for the sport came from learning the game in high school from her late father, Thomas Pugsley. At the time, Lind was in Southern California.
“Tried out for volleyball, didn’t make the team. I was walking home and I saw girls playing on the tennis court and I told my dad I wanted to play. He taught me,” Lind said.
Her success in the sport led her to a college offer in a polar opposite climate at Minnesota State University. She and her husband, Eric, would eventually move to Warsaw as Eric worked in orthopedics.
When Lind was approached in 2019 about helping out with the boys team at Warsaw it led her to coaching both the boys and girls programs with the Tigers. The community support and passion towards her programs is something Lind is thankful for.
“I had never had to go out and recruit kids they just come,” Lind said. “I have been really fortunate and we have such a good group of kids and parents. I get a lot of the very high academic kids. On my boys team, two of my boys were the valedictorian and the salutatorian.”
Lind says her time playing the sport has been positive for her health and for keeping others active too.
“Health wise it’s very good,” Lind said. “You’re out here exercising. Tennis is a smart person’s sport. You have to be very strategic to be successful in tennis.”
While pickleball has been trending up nationally, Lind wants to see the same for tennis. She says she is not ready to switch from tennis to pickleball anytime soon.
“I have not gone to the dark side yet,” Lind said when comparing tennis to pickleball. “I would just like to see tennis grow. I want to see it explode. I want to see my athletes love it as much as I do. It also never hurts to have a really successful season.”
