The Ross School’s boys tennis team was to have opened its season Tuesday at Hampton Bays, and its coach, Marcelo Reda, who also has been the private school’s athletic director since September, said the other day that the team is a strong one. With Eduardo Menezes, Henry Tietz, Leonardo Carmo, Jagger Cohen, and Teddy Brodlieb leading the way, it’s probably the strongest tennis squad Ross, the defending county small school champion, has fielded in years.
And yet while he likes to win, Reda, a native of Brazil who came to this country 16 years ago to study biomechanics and play tennis at Hampton University in Virginia, said he was more interested in nurturing a winning mentality than in winning per se. Looking up at the bulletin board in his small office in Ross’s Wellness Center Saturday afternoon, he recited the leadership traits attached thereon that he admires, among them courage, compassion, integrity, mindfulness, and the willingness to accord respect to others.
“You can teach those core values through sports, which is why I wanted to become an athletic director.” (Otherwise, he said, he would have remained as the Ross Tennis Center’s program manager.) “But I became an athletic director because I wanted to provide as many kids as I could with those values that would go with them throughout their adult lives, in their careers, in their family life. . . . By starting early, you can get kids to be better human beings. It’s that process that mainly interests me more than winning.”
As the A.D., Reda has seen to it that students who want to play a sport can do so, often with other South Fork schools, though Ross fields its own varsity teams in boys tennis, girls tennis, boys track, girls track, boys cross-country, and boys basketball, and junior varsities in boys basketball, boys soccer, and softball.
“I want to see kids put themselves out there,” he said, “to see them do something they’ve never done, or to master something that they love. I want to see that desire, that look in their eye.”
Reda said he thought about 75 percent of the 134 students in Ross’s high school grades played a sport. “You only have to play one sport your entire career here,” he added. “At other private schools you have to play two every year.”
Back to his team, Reda said he guessed Menezes’s Universal Tennis Rating was probably a 9, “but I don’t focus on that, either when it comes to my guys or the teams that we’re playing.” Vinicius Carmo, the Ross Tennis Center’s director, “has set the tone. He has always produced strong competitors; Ross’s success is because of him. We focus on our players. . . . If you train them in a certain way, success will come. We don’t do drills for the sake of drills. We do things specific to match performance. If we’re working with doubles players, we have them warm up hitting crosscourt, not down the line — crosscourt shots, serve returns, serves, and volleys.”
“Singles is completely different. Returns are to the middle, not angled. There’s less net play. Tennis is so much faster now. If you set up the point properly, it’s difficult to go to the net with any success.”
In sum, Reda, who also coaches Ross’s strong girls team, said, “we try to have them treat their matches as extensions of practice. . . . I’m looking forward to the season. I want to see our kids struggle and how they handle it. I’m excited to see how our kids react to competition, mentally and physically.”
And with that, he was off to Sag Harbor’s Mashashimuet Park to see the Bridgehampton-Ross varsity baseball team, a squad coached by Lou Liberatore that has half a dozen Ross students on it, play a game with Pierson.