By CHARLIE HUST
At the tender age of 14 and just an eighth grader, Maci Ferguson of Russell High School has a tennis state championship trophy under her belt. And her mother, Larra Kuykendall Ferguson, a Clay native and Webster County High School graduate, has joined in the success becoming the Russell girls’ tennis coach just three years ago.
Maci, and her doubles partner Kierstin Hensley, a 16-year-old sophomore, won the girls’ 2014 KHSAA doubles title last Saturday at the Hilary Boone Tennis Complex on the campus of the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
The Russell tandem, which advanced to the state semi-finals last year, traveled a tough road to its championship hardware defeating the state’s #2 seed overall (Caroline Cox and Alexis Austin of Louisville Collegiate) in a ‘battle royale’. The Collegiate squad had easily won a match against Ferguson/Hensley just three weeks prior to the state finals. They were the odds-on favorite to capture the state title and Saturday match looked like an easy victory on the court as they dominated the first set 6-0.
But the Russell duo changed it’s strategy and shocked the Collegiate tandem 6-4 in the second set.
“They (Collegiate) are monsters at the net. The just killed us up there,” noted Coach Ferguson. “So I just moved our girls back to the baseline (double-back) the rest of the match and we just rallied from the baseline on every point. Never came close to the net.”
The technique definitely worked as her young duo won the match with a 10-0 tie-breaker to advance to the finals.
They meet a very good squad from the newly-formed school McCracken County in the state finals. Ferguson/Hensley raced out to a comfortable 4-0, first set lead but saw McCracken’s duo of Madeline Kauffman and McKenna Garneau win three straight to close the margin to 4-3. At that point, Russell’s Hensley was serving and the game went to deuce 20 times before the Russell team won the game to go up 5-3. They then broke serve of McCracken’s Garneau to the win the match and the state title.
Both Ferguson and Hensley were named to the 2014 KHSAA All-State Tennis squad, while Coach Larra Ferguson had earned a second trip to the state finals and her first state champion in just three short years.
“They (Mac and Kierstin) have really made me look good,” Larra said with a laugh. “I never was much of an athlete at WCHS and knew nothing about tennis until Maci started playing when she was a third grader. She started playing for the high school team as a fifth grader and that’s when the head coach retired and she paved the way for me to become the new head coach.”
Maci is the grand-daughter of Larry and Dianne Kuykendall of Clay.