Longtime Montana Hall of Fame tennis coach Jim Gregg was in Kalispell last summer, and naturally he ended up at the courts one afternoon.
Since taking over the Cut Bank High School tennis program in 1983, Gregg has coached nine state championship teams, nine runner-ups and five third-place teams. He has produced 30 individual state champions, some of whom have gone on to play at Division I colleges, including his son Keithan, who is one of only three Montanans to ever win four boys state titles.
But on that summer day in Kalispell, something extraordinary caught Gregg’s attention: A slender young kid with long curly brown hair and a bullet of a serve playing nearby.
“I was impressed with everything,” Gregg recalled recently. “For his age, he really knew the game. His strokes were just very, very excellent. All around he just stood out. You don’t see that in young kids.”
Gregg figured it could only be one person. He was right. That’s Kellen Bates.
Since the spring of 2010, there has not been a more dominating force in Montana high school tennis than Glacier’s Kellen Bates. The 6-foot-3 junior has not lost a single match in the state in three years. Almost more astounding, he’s only lost one set – four points win a game; six games win a set; two, or sometimes three, sets win a match.
Put simply, Bates has been flawless.
“In terms of high school coaches and what everyone says, he’s just in a league of his own,” Gregg said of Bates. “He plays at a level above all the other high school tennis players.”
With his third straight Western AA divisional title notched off last weekend, the 16-year-old left-hander now has his sights on a rare third straight Class AA state singles championship this weekend in Missoula. Only eight boys have won three or more state singles titles in any classification in history, according to the Montana High School Association. His biggest competition will likely come from Missoula Hellgate’s Alex Braun, a longtime friend of Bates who took that lone set last season.
Bates’ dominance isn’t contained within the state either. Since he was 12 years old he’s been playing at tournaments around the country, including the national clay court championships, and recently qualified for an international event. When competing against a majority of players his age who are in tennis academies, he’s consistently ranked near the top 10 in the seven-state intersectional region of the United States Tennis Association. He’s currently ranked 63rd for the entire nation.
“As good as he is, he’s still improving at a pretty rapid rate. He’s getting better, which is just scary,” said Jimmy Cripe, his private coach who works at the Summit Medical Fitness Center. “He’s still got a big upside. A lot of kids would be satisfied with what he’s already accomplished. They might rest on their laurels. Not Kell. He pushes it pretty hard.”
Kellen’s parents, Rob Bates and Savita Chaudhry, started playing tennis at the Summit years ago. They would bring along their daughter Liana and her younger brother Kellen. The inevitable happened.
“I didn’t want to sit on the sideline and watch, so I’d go out there and play,” Bates said.
For his fifth birthday present his parents gave him a tennis lesson. Cripe, a former state champion at Whitefish High and all-American singles player at Montana State University, still remembers that first tennis lesson.
“He had the big hair and that funny smile,” Cripe recalled. “Kellen loved to hit the tennis ball. That’s one thing I knew about him from an early age. He was special even then when he was young.”
Realizing the young kid had a unique gift on the court, Cripe and Bates’ parents knew they had to handle his development carefully. Cripe has seen a lot of talent burn out early from overwork or too much pressure. Instead a young player with Bates’ promise needed to grow one step at a time.
“It’s a long path,” Cripe said. “There’s no rush when you’re young. He wasn’t the top kid back then. But here he is now.”
Tennis is a sport of natural reaction. A split-second serve requires an immediate return with little time to think. Mastering those successful reflexes is how someone becomes a champion, Bates said.
“If you really want to get good you have to put in the hours and the hard work,” he said. “I feel like more than anything tennis is a lot of feel, and feeling where you want the ball to be. It’s a lot of just knowing where you want it to go out of instinct rather than just thinking and going for it.”
Bates is attentive to the present moment and doesn’t get ahead of himself, he says. That’s just the way he thinks. And it’s not surprising for someone who dominates every moment of competition.
“I feel like you just have to stay really focused in every match. You can’t have any lapses,” he said. “It’s harder to recover when you’re playing bad. I think a lot of (tennis) is just focus and mental preparation. Once you get the ball rolling it’s kind of tougher for them to stop you.”