Will Boe-Wiegaard will have plenty of support during the NCAA tennis tournament.

LEWISTON – When the singles portion of the NCAA Division-III National Tennis Championships starts on Saturday, expect the Wallach Tennis Center to be teeming with interested fans.

Forget the fact that some of the best tennis talent from across the country will be converging on Lewiston. The bigger draw, at least to the Bates community, will be sophomore ace Will Boe-Wiegaard.

Playing in his second consecutive NCAA tournament, Boe-Wiegaard has a rare chance to capture the title on his home court.

“I’ll definitely have a lot of friends there,” Boe-Wiegaard said. “You have people cheering for you as opposed to against you. That is always a plus in a big tournament like this.”

The fact that a talented tennis player like Boe-Wiegaard is even at Bates may be confusing to some people, especially when they find out that he turned down Division-I schools like Wake Forest and Penn State to get here. But to Boe-Wiegaard, the decision was elementary.

“First of all I wanted to stay a bit closer to home,” Boe-Wiegaard said. “Wake was a 10-hour drive and Penn State was just too big. Aside from that, I want to go to medical school, and Bates was the best option for me to go pre-Med during undergrad. Bates is one of the top schools anywhere, and the size seemed just right.”

As for the tennis side of things, the player formerly ranked No. 1 among New England junior players wanted to make sure that he would face some top notch opponents, even in Division-III.

“The NESCAC schools were the only options for me if I was going to be in D-III,” Boe-Wiegaard said. “I wouldn’t even consider any other conferences. Here you get more matches against better opponents. If I had gone, say, to the Big 10, sure the tennis is great, but a school like Penn State is consistently at the bottom. I’d rather have a chance to win with the team than get killed in every match.”

Despite his prowess on the courts (Boe-Wiegaard has won the NESCAC singles title in each of his first two years in the league), his goal is not to play tennis professionally.

“I want to go to Med school,” Boe-Wiegaard said. “Of course it is something on the side that I enjoy doing. Actually, it’s a big something on the side, but academics certainly still come first. I know I was blessed to get the opportunity to come here for what I wanted to study, and I certainly don’t want to blow that.”

Currently, Bates is on its “short term,” a month-long period of classes during which several students take just one class. Boe-Wiegaard is taking just one class, but it may be the toughest class of all – cell biology.

“People around campus call the class cell-hell,” Boe-Wiegaard said. “You have a three-hour class in the morning and labs in the afternoon, and you have an exam every Monday.”

Still, Boe-Wiegaard finds enough time to practice. This week, he enters the 32-man tournament as the No. 2 seed in the East region. When the draw is revealed later this week, that seeding should result in some favorable opponents, at least in the first two rounds.

“They try to keep people within the regions as separated as possible early,” Boe-Wiegaard said. “They try to separate it out. As far as training for this, I have to try to keep it as normal as possible. If I try to over-practice it just adds to the pressure, the nervousness.”

With his own school providing the backdrop for this NCAA Championship, Boe-Wiegaard has yet another reason to relax, even if it is just something fun to do between classes.

jpelletier@sunjournal.com

Copy the Story Link