JHS tennis resurrected by Moy’s successful Y program
By Ben Cox
Photos/Special to The Source
Jacksonville School District 117 owns several regional and sectional titles in various sports over its 150+ year history.
One sport that has seen a major postseason drought over the last 30+ years has been tennis. According to the IHSA website, it has been over 20 years since Jacksonville has earned a sectional title in boys tennis and girls tennis.
Current Jacksonville High School tennis head coach Doug Moy is looking to change all of that. This May, three boys competed at the state tennis meet, with Moy hoping for more this coming year. Moy recalls that the initial season in 2020 when he started with the program was pretty rough, “I was teaching physical education at Washington [Elementary] School and the opening for the boys tennis program became available. I had no idea what that meant. In talking to Ryan Van Aken, I learned there were only five kids on the roster, so we had to find a sixth to make an official team.” Moy says they were able to recruit a young man off of the JHS band’s drumline to make a full roster and get started, but things didn’t get any smoother from there.
“After coaching my first match, we only won one game all year. Not a set or match, just one single game,” Moy says. It was then that he started putting ideas to work. Moy says he put pad to paper to outline a five-year business plan for the tennis program. Moy says that the roster doubled the next season as he began recruiting more students, and they went from 0 wins to 10 wins in just one season.
Moy says that the success truly started for the entire program when he began teaching youth classes at the Bob Freesen YMCA. “Why we’re as good as we are now is because I started teaching lessons at the YMCA and we called it ‘The Hit Squad.’ Currently in high school, every first year kid that was in The Hit Squad, like, a hundred percent are playing high school tennis,” Moy explains.
Moy says the boys’ squad is in the low twenties for numbers for this upcoming spring while the girls’ tennis team is expected to reach the thirties this fall. “Our level of tennis is starting to compete with our toughest competition,” Moy says, “We had Christian Bonner go to state a year ago, and then this past spring, we had Cole Nebel, Colin Knollhoff and Bennett Karr all get to state this year.” Nebel won his first match in singles play and was defeated by the player that eventually took runner-up for the state title.
Moy says they’ve surpassed the original five-year plan he laid out after that first season and new goals are on the horizon, “It doesn’t seem real that this is where we’re at now. I think we’re going to have somewhere between 75 and 80 kids come through here for the summer [lessons]. That’s way up from the eight kids I had going all the way back to the Y four years ago.” The summer lessons have four varsity players that are teaching the younger children how to play the game and basic fundamentals. Moy says that’s on purpose, because he wants the older players to be mentors to the next generation.
Cole Nebel, an incoming senior at JHS, is one of those four players on staff. He says he’s enjoyed teaching younger kids how to play the game, “I like it a lot. They’re really sweet kids and it’s exciting to come here in the morning and you can just have fun with them.” Moy says that Nebel has a leg up on his fellow instructors for the summer lessons as his mother is a kindergarten teacher in District 117. The summer lessons have also had a visit from a professional tennis teacher from Peoria to provide fundamentals to students as well.
Moy says the excellence doesn’t end there, it’s also in the classroom, “It’s just tennis kids equate to very strong academics. You have to be smart out here to be able to navigate a tennis court and an opponent. It’s way more a chess-like game than it is checkers. You really have to figure it out and move people around and get to a spot where you can put the ball away.” Moy says that most of the kids involved in his tennis program are in the top 5% of their classes.
As for the future of the tennis program at JHS, Moy says he wants to continue to compete well with the top programs in the area and see where the ball bounces. The high school girls tennis season gets underway with official practices starting Monday, August 11. The boys’ season will return in the spring of 2026.
