Alexander Pintilie '15 Recruiting Profile

I never really wanted to play tennis because I was already in love with soccer. At the age of nine my parents enrolled me into a East Hampton summer camp that had a program called AYP, where I was at camp for the first half of the day and playing tennis for the second. I only went because my friends wanted to go, even though I did not expect much. At first I missed tons of shots, but when I started playing games like “king of the court” and “around the block,” I won a lot of them and quickly realized that I genuinely loved this sport. A few weeks later I told my parents that I wanted to give up soccer and commit to tennis full time.

Now nine years later I’ve accomplished so much. At the age of ten I made it to my first final, and at thirteen I won my first tournament before going on to win many more. At fourteen I won a sportsmanship award and started playing nationals. And at the age of sixteen I broke top 400 in the country for my age group. I have had many difficulties with school due to my reading comprehension problems. These issues prevented me from reading books at levels that I should and from solving easy math questions as well. I could barely understand what was going on in the classroom and it was very hard to get through school; I was doing so poorly that, at its worst, my GPA was a 1.8 during freshman year. However, over the years I overcame these problems by forcing myself to study more and more every night. I read books on my own time so that I could move past my reading comprehension problems a little more every day. I also asked my math teachers for extra work so that I could practice at home after the actual homework itself. At the same time, as I won more and more matches, I started feeling more confident in school and, as I got better grades in school, I started feeling more confident on the court.

After hard work and learning to surmount these issues, by the end of Junior year I raised my GPA to a 3.1 for that year. In my past I’ve overcome many difficult problems, and I want to prove to which ever college I attend that I can succeed and conquer any challenge it may throw at me. I was incapable of reading books or doing math questions, but I went from that to an A and B student. I’ve gone through an eight match losing streak to winning the very next tournament. And as I improved in high school, I will continue to improve in college; I will bring all of my hard work and dedication to it, and to the tennis team for which I’ll play. I am so excited to make these contributions, and to continue that success after college as well.