Early riser

Published 11:07 pm Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Big brothers can have a major impact on little brothers. But Garrick Sanford didn’t take tennis as seriously at a young age as his younger brother Jace has at his age.

Growing up in Chatsworth, the older Sanford brother played travel basketball and was a standout for Murray County. He also played tennis all four years for the Indians before graduating in 2009, but it wasn’t until he walked on at the University of North Georgia that he began seriously competing.

Soon after, Jace — now a 9-year-old third-grader at Christian Heritage School in Dalton — was also taking it seriously. 

“He has been to my tennis matches ever since he was born,” Garrick said. “I have never seen a kid that young fall in love with a sport and work so hard at it. He is special as a kid and a tennis player.”

It was at one of Garrick’s matches that the tennis bug bit the hardest.

“It was my sophomore year of college, and we were at the conference tournament in Chattanooga and they had a little kids court with sponge balls and plastic rackets and he loved it,” Garrick said of Jace, who is 15 years his junior. “Afterward, we just taped off a court with duct tape on the driveway and bought a little roll-out net, and he always wanted to play.”

Leigh Sanford, Garrick and Jace’s mother, said that was the start.

“Every night after supper, it would be ‘Who is playing me tonight?’ It would never stop,” she said. 

It doesn’t look like it will stop anytime soon.

In just two full years of competitive play, Jace has earned the No. 1 ranking in the state of Georgia for 10-under boys and the No. 3 ranking in the United States Tennis Association’s Southern section, which includes most of the states in the South, with the exception of Florida. During the recent holiday break from school, Jace competed in the Icy Hot Winter Indoor Championships in Kentucky, beating William Michael McMullan in the singles finals and teaming up with him to win the doubles title.

Those wins pushed him up from No. 5 in the Southern rankings.

“My brother was really good at tennis, and I guess I liked it and followed in his footsteps,” Jace said. “I am very competitive. I’ve played basketball and baseball and football, and I have played tennis throughout it all.” 

The two players ahead of Jace in the Southern rankings will both be moving up to 12-under for the next tournament schedule cycle, and even though that would move Jace up to the top spot, he will be following that group to the 12-under ranks as well. Both Garrick and former University of Georgia tennis player and USTA teaching pro Brent Molyneux, whom Jace trains with once a week, believe there is little to be gained by staying in the same age group.

“It would benefit him more to play with the competition level he has been playing with, and in 12-under he would play full court,” Garrick said. “I think that will give him more of an advantage to be able to use the entire court. He has already won a couple of 12-under tournaments when he was 8, so it will be interesting to see how he competes this year.”

It will be another year of traveling to various tournaments across the South, something that is perhaps the most trying part of Jace playing at a high level for Leigh and her husband, Michael. 

“We usually try to take turns doing tournaments so we don’t get so burnt out,” Leigh said. “He is always ready to go, but the travel is the toughest part for us.”

Dressed in red and black for tennis practice at the Dalton Golf and Country Club on Tuesday, Jace said he hadn’t thought of being a professional tennis player — but he certainly knows where he wants to play college tennis. 

“I know he wants to play for the Georgia Bulldogs,” Garrick said. “We try to keep him level-headed and modest, and we will see where it goes. We try not to push him, but we can’t keep him off of the court.”