Adelaide based twin sisters Madison and Chloe Schwarz, are two young tennis players to keep an eye on in the future.
The talented eighteen year olds are off to Western Carolina University in the US to study and play tennis and whilst they have admitted their family, friends and favourite footy team Port Adelaide will be missed, they both cannot hide their excitement.
Speaking to The First Serve Chloe said “We are so excited and can’t wait to get over there, in April we found out we’d both received full scholarships and we couldn’t believe it,”
“We are very lucky that we are going to the same college as it makes it a lot easier than those people that do it individually.
“As long as we’ve got each other we’ll be fine, we’ll definitely miss our friends and family though and it will be a shame that we won’t be able to watch Port games live, that will be tough.
“We are counting the days down till we head off and it’s a great experience and we want to take our tennis to the next level.
“Mum (Vicki) has been incredibly supportive and she’s been trying to get us into the college pathway, she is very excited for us and whilst it will be hard to say goodbye to mum and dad, they will both come over and visit so that will be great.”
Madison won her first WTA point whilst playing in two 15K ITF tournaments Caloundra in Queensland recently and she has also played at ITF tournaments in Canberra and Traralgon this year and a UTR Pro Tennis series back in May.
Madison said that the Caloundra tournaments were a valuable experience and beneficial to build up a ranking as it puts her in a good place for future tournaments.
Chloe did not play in Caloundra as she was injured, however she has also played in the ITF tournaments in Canberra and Traralgon and the UTR Pro Tennis series this year.
The girls said they have not been playing in as many tournaments this year as they were wanting to spend more time in Adelaide before they head to college.
Chloe will be studying Health Sciences and Madison will be doing Journalism and is hoping to follow in her mother Vicki’s footsteps who has had been a Sports Reporter at Nine News since 1988.
The girls hope to travel to a few ITF Pros in the US and will go into a full season and will play against different schools around the conference.
Post college they want to come back to Adelaide and crack into the ITF circuit with the goal to play around Australia and Europe.
Madison and Chloe started playing tennis at 10 years old, they were encouraged to play by their mother Vicki who is not just a very talented Sports Reporter but also played state level tennis in the past.
The girls also tried playing other sports like aussie rules, soccer, and athletics but Chloe said they found that tennis was the sport they excelled at the most.
“When we were younger, we loved playing different sports, we gave sports like aussie rules, soccer and athletics a go,” Chloe said.
“We really enjoyed the competitive side of tennis and being able to fight for every point and doing it all by yourself.
“We started out at 10 years old at Port Adelaide and then we moved to the Seaside Tennis Club where we started taking things seriously with state league competitions.”
Madison paid credit to their tennis coaches and said they had been a big part of the success they have had so far in particularly Joel Kerley who was the previous coach of Thanasi Kokkinakis.
“We have built a great relationship with Joel Kerley who has been our coach the last four years, we will miss him and our other coaches as they have helped take our game to another level,” Madison said.
“It will be interesting to see what the coaches are like in the US, Joel is very excited for us.
“Kevin Swanson at Port Adelaide was also great in the early days for us both.”
Both girls said they were ultra-competitive and there had been some good battles between the pair throughout the years when playing against each other.
“We used to play each other very often when we were younger and we fairly even in the head to heads, it could sometime get fairly fired up on court,” Chloe said.
“Now that we play internationally, we have a few different girls which we play against which is good.”