Middle school tennis league marks 30 years

The year was 1995. Bill Clinton was the president of the United States, Gary Johnson was the governor of New Mexico and “Forrest Gump” won the Oscar for best picture. Pete Sampras and Steffi Graf won at Wimbledon.

Meanwhile, in Albuquerque, junior tennis was not holding serve.

The city’s high school programs were feeling the effects. Few kids other than those who’d grown up with the sport, at tennis clubs, were participating at the prep level.

Sue Jollensten had a thought, based on her own experience as a superb junior player in the 1960s.

Yes, tennis had taken her all over the state, the region, and elsewhere in the United States; she’d been that good. But she’d never had the opportunity to represent her school. There’d been no girls team at Del Norte High School, and middle-school (junior-high back then) tennis did not exist.

The following year, Jollensten, with help from La Cueva High School coach Dick Johnson, club pro Gary Stansifer and others in the tennis community, established the Northern New Mexico Middle-School Tennis League.

“She didn’t take no for an answer,” said Cee Ann Vaughan, the United State Tennis Association’s northern New Mexico representative. … “She said, ‘Well, we’ve got all these kids. Let’s get them playing tennis.’”

A lot of them did, and still do. This weekend, Jollensten & friends will celebrate the league’s 30th anniversary at the 2026 New Mexico Middle School Tournament, to be conducted at three city tennis facilities.

She has seen the league grow from six teams and some 100 kids that first year to a program that this year serves more than 300 students and includes teams from Los Alamos, Santa Fe and Belen.

“I wanted it created,” Jollensten said this week in a phone interview, “so that mid-schoolers would have connections with other students and to their school because middle school is kind of a transitory, difficult time in life.”

Through the decades, the program has include kids like Jollensten — whose name first appeared in the city’s sports sections in the late 1950s — who’d grown up with the game. But playing against or alongside them were kids who’d never never before touched a racket.

Another imbalance in the early years: considerably more boys than girls at some schools, the opposite situation elsewhere. Sometimes it was the girls who’d played before; sometimes it was the boys.

“So I created the Coed Mix-and-Match Division,” Jollensten said, “where they would be playing according to strength. A girl can play a boy; a boy can play a girl. I just wanted then to have a chance to represent their schools.”

The league has no affiliation with the New Mexico Athletic Association, which oversees scholastic sports competition in the state. The Middle-School Tennis league holds its season in the fall; tennis is a spring sport for the state’s high schools.

Though not intended as a feeder program for high schools, the prep ranks have benefited — right from the start.

In 1998 and ‘99 stories about Jollensten’s middle-school initiative, the Journal interviewed Loryn Erikkson, then a student at Eisenhower Middle School, and Delila Baldonado from Taylor Middle School.

Baldonado went on to play tennis for Cibola, Erikkson at Albuquerque Academy.

Vaughan mentioned Kessick Blech, an early participant in the league who played tennis for Eldorado in 2002-03. Blech is now a coach in the middle-school league.

While Jollensten was forming the middle-school league in the ‘90s, she was still playing tennis. The hope, she and Vaughan said, is always that pre-teens will become teenagers, then adults, and keep playing what they both call a lifetime sport.

“It’s a really nice pathway,” Vaughan said, “to get kids into what now has been declared the world’s healthiest sport.”