Spring Break
The Daily OrangeSchonbrun: Hear it from Jensen: Harman is cornerstone of program
By Zach Schonbrun
Posted: 4/14/09, 11:09 PM EST Section: Sports
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It's his playfulness that makes his program rhetoric so innocent - are the hand gestures for attention, or attention deficit disorder? - and he seems to acknowledge his role as a character and a kid. But for two years, he was, like it or not, the unquestioned face of the SU tennis team he tries relentlessly to prop up.
And so the soft rise of the No. 1 singles and doubles player this year comes as a twist: With little fanfare, a freshman has emerged as the building block Jensen seems to have been looking for since arriving at SU three years ago. There's irony in how he found her, too.
Scouring the nation for champions and winners, for those that believe, like him, that there are no moral victories, Jensen discovered Emily Harman after she had lost a match in a tournament in Arizona. In that, though, he saw enough.
"There's no ceiling in her game," Jensen said. "She has no flaws in anything she does."
The whirlwind tour of Harman's first season at Syracuse continues on, boosted by the accomplishment of leading the Orange to its best regular season ever, tested by the expectations pressed upon a 17-year-old still wetting her feet to what Jensen calls "20-25 percent capacity" to what she could be. She has paced SU's 15-5 record, the best in program history, as it heads into the Big East tournament on Thursday poised to make a run.
Led by a freshman, Syracuse finally seems to be fulfilling Jensen's master plan for reshaping the program. In his third year as coach, Jensen has finally hooked the prospect that can be its pillar.
She's a 5-foot-9 blonde who teammates nicknamed "Sunshine." There's almost nothing intimidating about her - until she crushes a 115-mph serve, with either hand.
"I call her 'West Virginia mean,'" Jensen said. "She gets that growl going and she kind of snarls. She really does come out to play. And it really is the cornerstone for what we're doing."
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