In a few weeks, a pair of St. Joseph High School tennis teammates will step onto an airplane—destination: Copenhagen, Denmark.
Avnish Bhatt, an incoming senior at St. Joe’s, will be making his first-ever trip to Europe, reveling in an exciting opportunity to improve his tennis game by training on clay courts with top Danish coaches. Bhatt’s return ticket to California is 10 days later.
August Munster, Bhatt’s teammate, has only a one-way ticket. Munster is simply going home.
Munster, 16, spent the 2015-2016 academic year as a foreign exchange student at St. Joe’s. He’s returning to Denmark this summer, to the town of Esbjerg—three hours west of Copenhagen—and will start “high school” in the fall.
In Denmark, high school is only three years long. A gap year after (what we call) middle school is standard for Danish youth. Five years ago, Munster’s older brother spent his gap year at St. Joe’s, which basically cemented Munster’s fate for his own trip to California.
“I had a really good year and a lot of good experiences,” Munster said with a Danish accent.
Over the course of the school year, Bhatt and Munster grew to be close friends thanks to their shared passion for tennis. Bhatt was quickly drawn to Munster, initially in admiration of his remarkable skills.
“[Munster] turned out to be super good,” Bhatt told the Sun. “I was the No. 1 player last year, and then this year … this guy definitely took my spot. He was on another level basically. He’s an amazing player. We started to hit in the off season and we started to become really good friends.”
The more Bhatt witnessed Munster’s game, the more he longed for a bit of that European magic—that biting spin Munster puts on the ball.
“The European style has so much spin,” Bhatt raved. “It’s another level.”
One day, as the friends discussed European tennis and the clay courts Munster grew up on, Bhatt, out of the blue, came up with what seemed like an outlandish idea at the time.
“We were at In-N-Out Burger, and it just kind of hit me. I was like, ‘What if I went to Denmark and trained with you this summer?’ I just threw it out there. It wasn’t anything serious,” Bhatt said. “And then [Munster] was like, ‘Actually, you could do that. I could make that happen.’”
The friends went their separate ways and consulted with their families. Could they do this? After some negotiating, the adults signed off on the trip.
Munster said that he plans to tour Bhatt around Copenhagen and show him Denmark’s “castles and other old stuff.”
“We’re going to see the Danish culture,” Munster said. “Denmark is a really old country. It has a lot of history. Copenhagen is an old city, but it’s pretty modernized now.”
But not much of the boys’ time will be spent on tourist activities. They will have some serious tennis training to get to.
Munster has lined up multiple training sessions for Bhatt with not only his Danish coaches, but with some of the top youth players in the entire country.
“I think he will improve a lot,” Munster said.
And Bhatt agrees.
“We’re going to have two-hour sessions in the morning and night,” Bhatt said. “It doesn’t get dark in Denmark until, like, 11 p.m., so they’re out there all night basically.”
Bhatt said that practicing on clay courts is fundamentally more difficult than playing on cement, which is why he’s looking forward to it.
“Clay is the best place to train because it really develops your ground stroke,” he said. “You have to work so much harder. [The clay] absorbs all the pop on the ball so you have to hit it consistently harder and with more spin to be effective. It really imprints all your strokes.”
The experience could set Bhatt up for a great senior season.
“It’s a huge advantage to have,” Bhatt said. “Once I come back, then the ball is going to go so much faster. It just zips around here. [Denmark] is a good place to train. It’s harder, and then you come back to something easier.”
While the Euro trip marks the last hurrah for the teammates—at least for now—Munster isn’t worried about losing touch with his friend Bhatt.
“Nowadays you can Skype and FaceTime and Facebook, so it’s not that hard to stay in touch,” he said.
Contributor Peter Johnson can be reached at pjohnson@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jun 23-30, 2016.
