First person interview with Sweet Briar tennis player Leslie Polaski

By Laura Clark

Published: April 2, 2008

Leslie Polaski is a Sweet Briar College sophomore from Monroe. She currently plays for the Vixen tennis team (3-2). She is an English major with a math minor. After graduation, Polaski may earn a Master’s in English, become a guidance counselor, or enter seminary school.

On playing tennis:

Sweet Briar didn’t offer basketball or track, which I did in high school. Playing sports for me is great for my time management. Whenever I’m not playing tennis, I’m not getting as much done as when I am playing tennis because I’m busier and I know if I don’t get my homework done now, it’s not going to get done later.
I wanted to be involved somehow, and my dad, over the summer, there was a guy on his (postal) route that was willing to give us tennis lessons for a really decent rate. So me and my mom and my brothers went and we got dirt cheap lessons from a great coach.
So I went out for the team. I wasn’t that great at playing tennis, just because I’d just learned. I’m really athletic and I pick up sports really quick. So that’s how it kind of happened.
I play (number) four singles and (number) two doubles. For this season that’s what my position’s been. We’re going to shuffle it around this week and see how people do where. I should have probably started playing tennis a really long time ago.
Tennis is a great way to get away from the day. Whenever I go to practice, I don’t think about anything else because I’m concentrating on how to play the game, like where my next shot is going to go, how hard I’m going to hit it, what kind of shot I want it to be. With all that going on in your mind, you can’t think about anything else.

On high school athletics:

I did discus and shot my senior year. I think I started discus and shot my sophomore year, but I also ran hurdles my freshmen and sophomore year. By the time I was a senior, I was out of practice and they had girls that were much faster than me. The reason I came back my senior year (was for) the new girls that had come on the team. They had no idea how to throw a shot or discus. So I came back to help them out.

On ultimate frisbee:

Oh my gosh, ultimate frisbee is the most amazing sport ever. If I could be on a team and play every day I would. I play with my church, Grace Free Evangelical on Timberlake. I think it might be the people that I play with, too. They’re very competitive, and it’s just a very intense game for me.

On sports after college:

I hope so. I’m not a very motivated person, as far as working out. Being on a team helps me get out and actually do the physical activity and get exercise because I feel like I’m obligated to the team to get out and participate.
Hopefully, one day, I’ll have kids of my own, and I’ll definitely want sports to be part of their life. I’m going to introduce it to them young and have them know how to play so when they’re older they can be like, “Maybe I should be part of a team.”
Being part of a team you learn things about life that you don’t get anywhere else such as making sacrifices for the team. Tennis is a very individual sport and I remember one time we kept hitting balls that would go out, and our coach was trying to break us of it, so anytime one of us hit a ball that was going to go out, instead of just letting it go out and get the point she would make us all run a few laps, or she’d make us get down and do pushups for hitting a ball out. It’s like, all right, I don’t want to make this mistake anymore because I don’t want to put my team through that.

On her first mission trip last summer:

It was probably the greatest experience of my life. I went down to Nogalas, Mexico for two weeks. Basically I worked construction. I just loved the heat. I loved the people. I loved the food. I loved the culture. I loved what I was doing. It was a great opportunity for me to have time to just sit down and be with the Lord. In America, it’s so much different because we’ve always got something to do. If you don’t have something to do you have something in the future you’ve got to prepare for. We’re very busy. But in Mexico it’s like, all right, I’m done with work. What do I do now? So you get that time to think about where you are in your life. I plan on going back this next summer.
Before I went to Mexico I was still a member of the Catholic Church. Coming back from Mexico, it gave me a lot of time to really analyze what it was that I believed and how it compared to the beliefs and the traditions of the Catholic church. Coming back, I realized that I didn’t believe in the same things that the Catholic Church did. I didn’t want to practice something that I didn’t believe. So I joined the church that I’m with now. I don’t call myself an Evangelical. I don’t have a denomination, I have my faith. Religion to me is traditions and frivilious formalities that people have made up over the years to make faith complicated. I know what it is that I believe and I have my faith.

On attending an all-women’s college:

There isn’t distraction. As I’ve been going to Sweet Briar, I’ve noticed more and more whenever I go into town on the weekends and go to a restraunt and there’ll be this table of guys, I’m like instantly on pins and needles, monitoring each thing I do. But being here its very relaxed. You’re open. No one wears makeup during the week. People wear pajamas and sweatpants to class. There’s no pressure to be a certain way because we’re all girls. We’re all the same.
Cons about coming to Sweet Briar…I think that guys do provide that insight, just a different perspective, a different outlook on things that we talk about in classes. We, because we’re all girls and we come from our perspective as women, we don’t have guys putting in their two cents about the issue.