HighFIVE: Morgan Schilling
H5 Episode 39 / Fall 2020 / by Katie Newell
Winning back to back 5A Boys singles titles was the culmination of years of intense hard work and personal drive for Regis Jesuit senior Morgan Schilling.
Next year, Morgan will take his powerful serve and technical skills to Claremont McKenna, knowing mental toughness may be his biggest asset.
“At this level, everyone is good and has big serves and big forehands,” he says of why working with a mental coach in addition to his hitting coach has been extremely important to him.
Morgan grew up in an athletic family whose original love was soccer. After hosting young soccer players from Manchester, England, into their home, the Schilling family moved to Barcelona for a year where Morgan had the opportunity to play tennis at Academia Sanchez-Casal, where he went to school in the morning and then played 6 hours of tennis each day.
The international experience did more than just create a great tennis player. It gave him the benefit of meeting people from all over the world.
“It was an eye-opening experience to know a diverse group of people with different perspectives,” he said.
That experience and intensity of training helped Morgan focus on his goals to bring the back-to-back singles titles home to Regis Jesuit High School.
“I’m very passionate about tennis,” he said. “Early on I set my sights on getting The Colorado Player of the Year banner in the RJ gym and I achieved two. It’s pretty exciting!”
And while Morgan said there was definitely pressure to succeed, he said he knew he couldn’t let things get to his head and needed to work hard and be optimistic – advice he feels younger players would benefit from when they get down or lose an important match.
“I think the most important thing is to keep everything in perspective,” Morgan explains. “A loss is just a loss. When you play hundreds of matches it just doesn’t matter. Learning from the losses does.”
The future is wide open for Morgan who is planning on studying business finance and computer science while playing high level collegiate tennis. He is looking forward to the next set of his life both on and off the court and Morgan has strong support as he enters this next phase.
“Friends and family are the most important thing to me,” he said.
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