Newly-minted junior captain Reilly Fowles of the Northampton boys tennis team headed to the tennis courts at John F. Kennedy Middle School to get some extra practice in.
He had noticed a large improvement in his play from his freshman season to his sophomore season and wanted to keep improving, but also wanted to help out his teammates on a much younger Blue Devils team than the year before.
“I was going to go hit on the courts with some other players on the team,” Fowles said. “And I was like ‘you know what, let’s get the whole team out here.’”
Along with fellow captain Durrell Patrick, Fowles organized captain’s practices, instructed his teammates on mental skills, helped coach the Blue Devils’ younger players and involved the girls tennis team more than in years past.
Northampton ended the year with a Western Mass. Class A runner-up finish and an 11-4 record, with one loss against Mansfield in the state tournament and three losses against Longmeadow, winners of 25 of the last 26 Western Mass. Class A crowns. Before Northampton’s defeat in the MIAA Round of 16, Fowles’ only losses came against Western Mass. individual champion Kevin Liang (Longmeadow) and Amherst’s Miles Jeffries.
Fowles was selected as the 2024 Daily Hampshire Gazette Boys Tennis Player of the Year.
He started playing tennis at 5 years old, where the “racket was as big as I was,” Fowles said. He often played casually with his family, including older brother Galen, who he recruited to play for the Blue Devils team for the first time this season as a senior.
Fowles played competitively for the first time as a freshman on Northampton’s team and noticed marked improvement in his ground strokes and serve in his sophomore season. In this past season, his junior campaign, he sought to improve his strategy on the court and worked to dictate more points than in the past, where he labeled himself as more of a defensive player.
Through tournaments over the winter, he observed how other players moved him around the court and tried to replicate that in his own strategy. Now, his recognition of angles and court geometry is his biggest strength, one opposing coach said.
In the Western Mass. finals against Liang, Fowles trailed 5-4 with Liang serving for the first set. Liang had spent the previous nine games hitting Fowles with pace and moving him from corner to corner. But Fowles started to play more aggressively and get to the net more, and he reeled off three straight games to come back and win the set, the first time he had taken a set off Liang in his career and the first time Liang had dropped a set all season. Though Liang took the final two sets to win the match, Fowles could feel the progress he made in his own game.
While Fowles improved his own game this season, he also helped several other members of the Blue Devils team reach new levels of play.
In optional captain’s practices led by Fowles and Patrick, Northampton went through volley drills, baseline rallies and serving practice. There wasn’t much precedent for captain’s practices, but Fowles said they were valuable for polishing some aspects of play the team didn’t necessarily get to work on in practice as well as sharpening up if the Blue Devils had a match coming up early in the week. Fowles also wanted to pass down some of the mental skills he had learned.
“We wanted to teach some of the mental side of tennis,” he said. “What to do if you’re up, what to do if you’re down, how to keep your doubles partner motivated, how to stay positive – we were doing a bunch of that.”
Fowles focused on helping each member of the team game plan for specific situations. For example, if one of his teammates was down 40-30 and needed a point to stave off a break, Fowles would help them decide whether to use a more offensive tactic like a wide serve or a kick serve or a more defensive strategy to help them stay in the point. It all depended on how comfortable each player was with each tactic.
Fowles noticed several points throughout the season where his teammates lost the first set, but came back to regroup between sets and won the second set decisively.
“In some cases, it’s not about telling them what to think, that’s very personal,” Fowles said. “It’s more about helping them realize what kind of mindset will help them get through a match. They may already have that mindset, but they just need to realize that that’s the best mindset for them at the time.”
Fowles was also heavily involved in helping Northampton’s underclassmen acclimate to the sport. When freshman Daniel Kunhurtsev joined the team, Fowles encouraged him to come over to his house and walk over to practice together, Northampton head coach Ben Lewis said.
Fowles often hit with the Blue Devils’ sophomores at practice and on the weekends. He taught Northampton’s doubles teams how to do a swing volley and said he noticed an improvement in their net play as the season progressed.
And on the weekends and during the weeks, Fowles worked with the girls tennis team to coordinate mixed doubles and mixed drills.
“There’s really good players on both teams,” Fowles said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a girl hitting against a boy, there’s equal amounts of skill on both teams so I thought it was a good opportunity to play against some more players, different styles and just try to unify the teams a little bit, because they don’t have to be separate.”
Though his brother Galen is moving on to play golf at the University of Rochester, Fowles will be back next year to try to lead Northampton to another Western Mass. final after a Class B championship in 2023 and a Class A runner-up finish in 2024.
“I feel very lucky – assuming everyone stays healthy,” Lewis said. “That he’ll come back to lead the team next year.”
