Poway grad Klahn, an NCAA tennis champ, has busy summer

As Bradley Klahn prepares for his junior year at Stanford University this fall, he knows that he’ll have a really big target on his back.

After all, he’ll be the defending NCAA Division I singles champion, after finishing a 39-8 season with the Cardinal. He became the first to win an individual championship for the Palo Alto school since 2000.

According to the school, the 2008 Poway High grad is only one of 14 Stanford students to win the singles championship, and the ninth to do so after the NCAA adopted its current program. (Tennis legend John McEnroe accomplished the feat for the school in 1978).

Now on break, Klahn is playing in lots of professional tournaments this summer. He said he plans on not taking any money to maintain his amateur status so that he can continue playing collegiate tennis.

Earlier this month Klahn was in New York in the Futures Professional Tournament, where he lost in the first round in the tournament, which is played on clay, which Klahn says is not his best surface.

He also played in the $75,000 Comerica Bank Challenger in Aptos, Calif., as a wild card and played two qualifying round matches in the ATP World Tour’s Farmers Classic which concludes Aug. 1 in Los Angeles.

Klahn defeated Australia’s Kelly Dayne, but fell to Ilija Bozoljac of Serbia, who went on to qualify for the tournament.

Though the mantle in his Poway home now boasts an NCAA trophy, Klahn said he knows he can only top that by not being satisfied and to set higher goals for himself.

“I just want to continue to work hard and continue to mature both mentally and physically,” Klahn said in a recent phone interview. “I need to not worry about results and focus on what I need to improve.”

Klahn said the NCAA trophy was an incredible finish for a season that began a bit spotty, as he dropped a couple of matches at the beginning of the season.

“Everything came together at the right time at the NCAA,” he said. Though he was nervous going into the final match, he was able to overcome that and won handily.

“It was just such an unbelievable feeling, that it’s hard to put into words,” he said. “It was a rush of emotions to add to (Stanford’s) list of former champions.”

Klahn, who plans to major in economics, said he’s looking forward to returning to school in September. He said though he does have aspirations to become a professional tennis player upon graduation, he’s not putting too much emphasis on that for the time being.

Up ahead, he knows the NCAA title will make him a target for all of his opponents, he said.

“I’m going to get everyone’s best shot and I have to be ready and keep working and knowing that everyone else is working just as hard to try to overtake me,” he said.

As a goal, Klahn said he’d like to defend his title, and also win a doubles title and a team title especially since Stanford is hosting the NCAA finals next year.

Klahn said he didn’t start playing tennis until he was 11 years old, when his mother enrolled him in a summer round-robin league.

“I guess 11 is pretty late, since a lot of kids start at ages 5 or 8,” he said. But he credited the late start with helping him not burnout on the sport.

“I’ve always tried to make sure that I continue to love the sport,” he said. “That’s the ultimate reason I play, not for a career — though obviously it would be nice to make it into a career — but this is what I love doing.”

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Posted by unestidstwern on Jul 28 2010. Filed under Archive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry