Tennis Director Veronica Lima-DeAngelis Featured in Laconia Sun

By Adam Drapcho
Laconia Sun

NEW HAMPTON — For the past 18 years, Veronica Lima DeAngelis has split her life between developing the tennis program at New Hampton School and flying around the world to compete in professional tournaments.

She’s now 52, and a mother and grandmother, and has no intention of slowing anytime soon. Lima-DeAngelis, a Bristol resident, competes in the International Tennis Federation’s “seniors” circuit, for players over 50. She is ranked 27th in the world in that category and in March of this year she surprised her opponent with a baseline drop shot to win a dramatic tiebreaker in a two-and-a-half hour long final match of a clay-court tournament in Portugal.

From that grueling victory, she was back on a plane for the United States to prepare to lead another season as the private boarding school’s tennis director and head coach of the men’s varsity team. When the season’s over, it’s back to the airport for tournaments in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Come the fall, she’ll return to New Hampton to lead the non-competitive fall tennis program she runs by herself. Last year she had 46 students participate.

"I just keep going because I love the game so much. The tennis court for me is like a shrink,” she said. “Once I step into the court, I just want to enjoy life, I just want to have fun.”

The child of a Portuguese woman and a German man who worked in international law, Lima-DeAngelis’s younger life resembled her current one. At various times in her youth, she lived in London, Brazil and Miami, among other places. She is a dual US-Brazil citizen, but plays as an American. Fluent in Spanish and Portuguese as well as English, Lima-DeAngelis had to learn Italian to work with her current coach. For her, switching between languages and cultures is second nature, as is transitioning from player to coach and back again.

"When it’s time to coach, it’s time to coach. When it’s time to win, it’s time to win,” she said.

Lima-DeAngelis, noting that the tennis world is beginning to leave her adopted home country behind, said she brings a European approach to the game. In comparison to the American philosophy, the Continental game is one raised on clay courts, where outright power loses to strategy and patience. She said European coaches encourage their students to consider the tennis court as a chessboard.

"You don’t win with power, you win by thinking when you make your shot, what is going to come next?”

For her, it’s understandable that the top ranked tennis players, especially younger ones, are not Americans. International players, she said, especially from less-wealthy countries, “are very hungry. The European kids don’t have as much as the American kids, so they look at life in a different way,” she said.

So, how does she address those issues at New Hampton School, where students play on hard courts and aren’t likely to come from low-income homes? The answer is push-ups.

"Patience is the most difficult thing to teach,” she said.

Many of the players she sees entering her program think they’ll be able to step onto the court and rip winning shots from the baseline. That might work for some professionals, but for most players it results in balls that slam fiercely into the net, resulting in a costly unforced error and a point for the opponent. So, for every ball that her players hit into the net during practice, Lima-DeAngelis prescribes a set of push-ups. The players quickly learn to work on their accuracy and strategy.

 “No one wants to do push ups for two and a half hours,” she said.

More than just patience, Lima-DeAngelis teaches respect and consideration. If players are late to practice, they have to perform 20 sprints up a nearby hill as penance. If they curse or slam a racquet during a match, or cheat on line calls, she’ll forfeit the match.

It’s not that she wants to win, she does, but she wants to win honorably. That’s why, when evaluating her new crop of freshmen every year, she pays attention to a player’s technique and form during a point as well as what happens after the point is over.

“I really look hard at their character. I look at their behavior, I look at their principles.”

It’s the form and technique of the swing that might determine which freshman wins that day, but it’s the player’s other characteristics that will determine who will win as the season and years progress.

"I want the kids to have determination, desire, and be honest,” she said. “It’s a life sport, I think that the decisions you have to make in tennis, sometimes, are like the decisions you have to make in other parts of your life. It makes you a better person, it makes you grow,” she said.

That’s why she sticks with the sport, she said. That’s why she also sprints up the hills after her players have left for dinner, and why she’s on a plane every chance she has to try and find a way to beat the best tennis players in the world. Because, she said, the game is about more than serves and volleys, ground strokes and over-head smashes.

"There’s more than that, there’s way more than that,” she said.