Tennis: Ritger rolling right along

Entering her freshman tennis season at Douglas High School, Amelia Ritger was simply hoping to qualify for the regional tournament.

She'd had some success on the summer tennis circuits, but just wasn't sure what to expect from the Northern 4A.

"I really wasn't sure what was out there," Ritger, now a sophomore, said. "I wasn't expecting to do well, I just really wanted to make it to the zone tournament."

Something happened, though, the first time she took the court in a Tiger uniform and it hasn't stopped since.

She won. And won, and won, and won some more. In fact, she has taken the court against a Northern Nevada opponent 67 times in her two-year career, and never once experienced defeat.

"About halfway through my freshman year I started thinking I had a shot to win the regional title," Ritger said. "Usually, I don't think about the streak. I try to push it off when people bring it up. I don't keep track of it myself. I just focus on going out there and trying my best to win."

So far, it has worked.

Ritger has won two regional titles, playing perhaps some of her strongest tennis during the course of the two tournaments. The lone blemishes on her already spectacular career are a pair of losses in the state tournament to Green Valley's Jessica Hsu.

Her win streak within the region is considered to be the longest in school history, although Lisa Chacon put together some long runs in the '80s and will go untouched as the school's winningest player at 184 wins (The schedule used to include almost double the league matches, making it mathematically impossible to approach Chacon's career numbers). Ritger has a shot, however, to break the school record for regional titles in a career, having tied Chacon at two this year.

Hearing Ritger's record, and the efficiency with which she dispatches her opponents (during one stretch this season, Ritger had gone nine sets without surrendering a single game), one would expect her to exhibit the attributes most commonly associated with the very highest levels tennis: Power serves, corner-painting ground strokes, blistering win shots or even an aggressive approach to the net.

Watching her play, one comes away with an entirely different picture.

"I really like knowing my opponents game," she said. "I scout them myself. When I get on the court, I know what to expect and I just play my own game."

And her game can often times be like watching a surgeon at work. Other times, it can be a little like watching paint dry.

At one point during her freshman year, her coach joked that she looks bored while she's on the court.

It's not that she doesn't possess the tools to play the power game, because she does. Instead, she chooses to use those tools as part of a grander scheme of completely dismantling her opponent.

Some of her regular season single sets have lasted upwards of an hour and a half. Almost all of her approach is geared to forcing her opponent into mistakes.

"I'm a big patience person," Ritger said. "Last year my entire game was about lobbing the ball back and trying to get at my opponent so that they'd try to hit a winner. This year, I worked on my power game a lot over the summer. I spent the season mixing up power shots and lobs and that worked out really well this season."

Her strategy is simply to draw her opponent closer to a meltdown as the match wears on.

Perhaps nowhere was this more prevalent than in an early-season match in Minden this year when by the end of the set, Ritger's opponent had thrown her racket into the ground out of frustration no less than six times and was bought to the point of open tears at least twice.

"That's pretty much what I want to do," Ritger said with an only half-kidding laugh. "I've had so many players come up to me after a match and say 'You are totally in my head, I hate you.' It's funny, because I'm nice off the court, but I like playing those head games on the court.

"I work really hard to draw them into hitting their best shots, and I try to spend enough time on my fundamentals to be able to fire it right back when they do. It can be very frustrating for them."

Indeed, it seems a majority of Ritger's preparation is mental. When she's on the court, she spends her time dissecting the player and planning how to best attack.

Take Reno High's Shelly Tone, for example. Ritger had never beaten Tone in previous summer tournaments and she knew she'd be seeing her this season. Ritger blew past Tone in the regular-season finale at Reno and then swept her in the semifinals of the regional tournament.

"Pretty much my entire season was geared toward playing her," Ritger said. "I worked the whole summer just trying to increase my skills and built toward her game. Once I got out there, I just tried not to get nervous against her. It worked."

Then there was the regional final match against Galena's Hannah Llop, the girl who Ritger had to beat for the title last year and is often Ritger's doubles partner during the summer.

"That one was hard because we just know each other so well," Ritger said. "We both had to mix things up. It was hard getting past her, I had to adapt to her game a lot more and she adapted to my game. It was a bigger challenge than what I have seen.

"It came down to just returning her shots. She was hitting some shots that I couldn't get to, so I had to play a lot harder."

It was eight years ago that Ritger, then 7 years old, was flipping through the channels on television and came across a tennis match between Venus and Serena Williams.

"I thought it looked pretty fun," she said.

The only problem was, a lot of things at that time were looking pretty fun.

Ritger had recently taken her shot at ballet and tap dancing and her parents were a little hesistant to launch into something new.

"I was trying a whole bunch of stuff at the time and I was quitting a bunch of stuff," she said. "My parents bought me a cheap racket because they weren't sure how long I'd do this. I ended up staying with it, it came pretty naturally."

Her coaches at the time were pleased with her development as a player and it wasn't long before she was competing on a team in the state open at UCLA. Her team came away with a championship trophy.

"Tennis was just a lot of fun," Ritger said. "Dancing got kind of boring after a while, it just didn't appeal to me. But I loved tennis."

Her family moved from Huntington Beach, Calif., three years ago and Ritger quickly plugged in to the Northern Nevada and Northern California junior satellite circuits.

"I get a lot more experience in the summer," she said. "People come over from California, Oregon and Arizona. It helps a lot with the high school season. You see it especially when you get to regionals and you're playing two or three sets. Some girls who don't play in the summer start wearing down, but you've been playing these all summer, so you don't notice it as much."

Something clicked for Ritger when she won that first title.

"After winning that first regional title, I really wanted to be able to win it all four years," she said. "Just to have something extra to put on my resume for college."

Just in case she didn't have anything else to put on there. Ritger spends only about four hours on the court during the offseason and splits the rest of her time between her honors load of classes (She is carrying a 4.3 GPA), the Speech and Debate team (she does humorous and dramatic interpretation and Lincoln-Douglass debates), the 4-H Rabbit Club and Key Club.

If that weren't enough, she also plays for the Elements United soccer club in the spring.

"I really don't end up playing a lot of tennis," she said. "I try, but it is hard with school and everything else.

"I would really like to play in college. I don't think I'm good enough to play at a big school, but I'd really like to play somewhere. Either way, I will keep playing as I get older. It's like golf. You can play your entire life."