From Mexico to the US, Roberto Guagnelli, junior on varsity boys’ tennis, didn’t begin his tennis career like any other LZ player.

Guagnelli, who moved to Mexico when he was 9 because of his dad’s job, had to find a new sport to replace his love for football, which wasn’t played in Mexico. After trying out and disliking track, he decided he would start playing tennis.

“I had just started when I was 10, so it was kind of like my beginnings of tennis,” Guagnelli said. “Once I moved to Georgia, when I was about 12, that’s when I really started getting into it because I had really good coaches there.”

Guagnelli, overall, was in the top 80 best players of the midwest in the United States Tennis Association (USTA) last year, and has been playing on the top of the school’s varsity lineup for two years.

“My favorite thing is probably just the feeling of winning,” Guagnelli said. “There’s just something about winning in tennis, especially in singles, it’s really just gratifying because it’s all you out there.”

While being all alone on the court makes winning that much more gratifying, according to Guagnelli, it is also very tough.

“It’s super mentally hard, because you are all alone in singles,” Guagnelli said. “It feels good to win because it’s all you, but at the same time when you make mistakes, it’s hard on you because there’s no one out there to back you up.”

According to Guagnelli, there’s a lot of things that he needs to work on, but he also says his enthusiasm is not one of them.

“I always want to win and want to get out there and play,” Guagnelli said. “There was one match that I played, this was when I was like 14: I lost the first set 6-0, I was down 5-1 in the second set, came back and won that 7-6, and then won the tiebreaker 14-12. That was really fun.”