California import with a lightning fast serve
ANDOVER – David Hughes has been coaching high school tennis for a quarter of a century. And one particular trait in his No. 1 player, Nik Narina, stands out among all of the best and the rest.
Narina’s serve. It’s blistering. And when accurate, it’s borderline as good as it gets.
“He has a dominant serve. When it’s working, it’s one of the highest velocity serves that I have seen in high school tennis,” said Hughes.
Narina said that his serve ranges between 90 to 100 miles per hour.
“In my twenty-five years of coaching, I would say that he’s in the top three all-time in terms of his serve velocity,” the coach stated. “He gets a lot of free points from his serves. He serves a flat ball, and it arrives quickly.”
Narina didn’t always have this weapon in his pocket.
“When I was younger and I started serving, I was really, really conservative with my serve and I never went for too much,” he said. “Then once I moved to Manchester Athletic Club, one of my coaches told me that since I’m so tall that my serve should be stronger and faster.”
At 6-foot-2, Narina took those words of advice and rolled with it.
“He told me to take advantage of my height and if I have a better and faster serve, I’ll win more points easily and get in the head of my opponents,” said Narina.
That has worked.
As a sophomore, Narina was named the Merrimack Valley Conference Player of the Year.
Last year as a junior, he finished with nine wins and was again named to the MVC All-Conference team as well as an Eagle-Tribune All-Star.
“I really had to work on my footwork,” he said, noting that he will attend UMass Amherst, study engineering and try out for the men’s tennis team.
“My freshman and sophomore years, I could hit the ball obviously but being so tall sometimes it’s hard to move and my feet would get lazy. That’s what I worked on last year – footwork drills and agility exercises.”
He is undefeated, 5-0, in MVC matches with his only two defeats coming in non-league matches against Westford Academy and Lexington.
Success for this star player, says Hughes, is far from just having an elite serve.
“Nik decided that he really wanted to improve his net game,” said Hughes. “He has always worked from the baseline, so he has worked on moving from the baseline to the net and finishing points. That is something that has really improved his game.”
Narina picked up a racquet for the first time at age seven while living in California. His father introduced him to the sport after playing in India, before he and his wife moved to the United States.
“I went to India a couple of years ago and it’s really nice there,” said Narina, who is part of the school’s robotics club, which finished 17th out of 64 teams in their division at the World Championships held a few weeks ago in Houston, Texas.
“(India has) a lot of clay courts there so it’s an experience. It’s fun to play there, but it’s also pretty humid.”
You can email Jamie Pote at jpote@eagletribune.com.
