When Catherine Harrison is on the court, the one thing that stands out the most isn’t how hard she hits, but how.
She swings with a two-handed forehand, a tennis stroke that’s unconventional and rarely seen. At the same time, it’s a groundstroke she’s held onto for her entire tennis career, one that’s rooted from when she first picked up a tennis racket at the age of 3 – with both hands.
“I was so small when I started tennis that I couldn’t swing the racket with one hand, to be honest,” Harrison said. “And it just stuck.”
But something that can’t simply be seen through her play on the court is how the sophomore followed an unorthodox path before becoming a mainstay in the UCLA women’s tennis team.
The daughter of former college tennis players, Kent and Jan Harrison, a young Catherine Harrison eventually found her way on the sidelines of tennis courts in Memphis, Tenn., watching her parents rally back and forth from inside her playpen. But she always wanted a piece of the action. When she learned how to stand on her own two feet, she finally got her chance.
By the age of 12, Catherine eventually moved on to taking private lessons with a coach who could develop her burgeoning talent for tennis – Peter Lebedevs took the young tennis player as a pupil.
“Just the competitiveness and the desire to ensure she did it right, it’s one of those ingredients that a lot of people don’t have, and she had that from a very young age,” Lebedevs said. “She had one of those ingredients, those ‘it’ factors that when you looked at her it doesn’t take five minutes to realize and say, ‘OK, this kid’s got something special.’”
Relying on pure talent, pedigree and determination, however, wasn’t enough. To really take her game to the next level, her new coach told Catherine she needed to reach out further.
At the advice of Lebedevs, the Harrisons enrolled Catherine in the Harold Solomon Tennis Institute in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. For Jan, this meant finding a new job as a science teacher and a new condo in Florida to be with her daughter. But for Kent, who couldn’t leave his job, it meant the only time he got to spend time with his daughter would be after he made the close to 1000-mile journey from Memphis.
“It was a huge sacrifice because he was giving up a lot of time with his daughter at a critical time in her life and it was hard on our family commuting back and forth,” Jan said. “We’ve done a lot of crazy things like that to try and help her with her tennis.”
It was a “huge difference” for Catherine’s life around tennis. What was once just private lessons and clinics at tennis clubs, her commitment to the sport became a daily routine of starting practice at 7:45 a.m. and only seeing her mother after training was done at 5:30 p.m.
The additional hours and sudden jump in intensity of her training schedule didn’t break Catherine down. Instead, it renewed her commitment.
“It definitely made me more serious about tennis,” Catherine said. “Before the academy, I was still playing tournaments, but I was essentially a social tennis player. That was when I really decided to dedicate myself to tennis.”
After a year at the tennis academy, Catherine returned to Memphis, undertaking a full training schedule with Lebedevs in the hopes of developing a professional career for herself.
But at this stage of Catherine’s tennis career, the Harrison family once again encountered another situation in which they had to make a hard decision. Catherine had to start thinking about high school, but there just wasn’t an option in Memphis that would accommodate her commitment to the sport.
“Even in middle school when I would miss, say, a Friday and a Monday for a regional tournament, that would put me so far behind and I would be staying up so late and I was only in the seventh grade,” Catherine said. “I just figured if I really wanted to take tennis seriously and make it really a priority I would have to do online schooling.”
With that decision, Catherine could not only continue to travel nationally for tournaments, but internationally as well, running back and forth along the baseline in a foreign court at a time when everyone in her hometown would be fast asleep.
The experience Catherine accumulated playing competitive tennis throughout her youth drew the attention of many college programs that offered her four-year scholarships. The luster of the offer combined with shared beliefs in the importance of education among the Harrisons meant that when Catherine turned 18, the only next step was college – bypassing a higher education to enter the pro circuit wasn’t even an option.
After initially committing to Georgia Tech, Catherine decided to opt out of her letter of intent after finding out the coach she wanted to train with, Bryan Shelton, had taken a post with the Florida men’s team.
Just one day removed from a tournament in New Orleans, Catherine was immediately on the next flight to Los Angeles, getting ready to explore the option of spending her next four years at UCLA.
It took Catherine all but a day to decide that being a Bruin was the best fit for her. Catherine didn’t even have a chance to celebrate this decision; the next day, she was competing in the Wimbledon junior tournament in London, where she also officially signed her letter of intent.
This weekend, Catherine will be in Athens, Ga., competing for a chance to live the dream of winning the NCAA tournament championship game – a dream she previously only saw through a television screen in her living room in Memphis.
The people who formed the pieces of Catherine’s life growing up – Kent and Jan Harrison and Peter Lebedevs – will all be with her in Athens as she lives that dream.