Commitment Profile
Countdown: Wake Forest Scores Trio of Stellar Recruits
by
Ali Jones, 23 October 2012
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On a stormy Saturday in early September, three high school tennis players were among the horde of screaming Wake Forest fans at the BB&T Field. The young women could not have asked for a more spirited display of school tradition, loyalty, zeal and a riveting football game, won by a mere point in the final two minutes by the Demon Deacons over rival Tar Heels.
Samantha Asch, Luisa Fernandez and Kimmy Guerin were Head Coach Jeff Wyshner's official guests. Together they watched the game. Separately, each toured the campus, met with advisers and professors, and sized up the tennis program.
Not long after the much celebrated football victory, Wyshner and Wake Forest, one of the nation's top liberal arts universities, received verbal commitments from the talented and discerning five-star recruits from New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.
Samantha Asch, Princeton, New Jersey
Samantha Asch started her college search as a junior at Princeton Day School, one of New Jersey's premier prep schools. She painstakingly wrote out letters to college coaches, almost as if she were "applying for a job."
"I wanted to play Division I, and I wanted to try to get a scholarship," the five-star recruit said. "I made an effort to reach out to coaches, something which my dad saw from one of the articles on TennisRecruiting."
She sent letters to about twenty coaches and detailed her tournament results, her grades, and the fact that she has successfully balanced academic and athletic excellence.
"I'm an elite tennis player who goes to a private school and definitely not getting the hours that the average academy kid does," she said. "I also tried to sell my game style, that I'm a very good competitor who's always hungry to win. That's one of my biggest assets."
A top-40 player who has had a career-high ranking of 14, Blue-Chip status and who is an Honor Roll student, Asch received a lot of interest and responses.
"I really liked all the schools I reached out to," Asch said. At Wake Forest, however, she found her college home and a major: Health and Exercise Science, which she feels is a natural extension of her love of sports.
During her official visit she gleefully joined in the time-honored Deac tradition of covering the Quad's trees with rolls of toilet paper to celebrate the defeat of the Tar Heels.
"It was fun," Asch laughed. And it was an environment she believes she'd fit right in.
