Many consider Dan Vonk to be the tennis coach in Camden County. For the past 19 seasons, he has been courtside for the Wildcats boys and girls teams, teaching values such as respect to eager young players. He is best known for his no-cut policy. “If you are a kid and love tennis, we have a place for you,” Vonk says.
Among his former pupils are doctors, ship commanders, pilots, engineers, and at least one real live rocket scientist. In his own playing days, Vonk encountered many opponents, but only one nearly cost him his life: Cancer.
Chondrolsarcoma, a type of advanced bone cancer, was discovered in Vonk’s right thigh. Doctors at Mayo Clinic told Vonk that his hip and femur would have to be removed because this type of bone cancer does not respond well to radiation or chemotherapy.
“I assembled three close friends who were tennis players, and I played what I thought might be my last tennis match that I would ever play,” Vonk says.
Fortunately, prosthetics replaced the missing bone, and Vonk was eventually able to play, and more importantly, to coach tennis again. After going through physical rehab and learning to live with new bones, he became the head tennis coach at Camden County High School in 1996.
He credits the community and his fellow coaches for helping him develop Camden into a high quality, competitive program. They include his longtime assistant Marcus Long, who runs the feeder program at St. Marys Middle, and “main co-coach” Daniel Breag. “I can’t just call him my assistant,” Vonk admits.
Breag says Vonk thinks progressively as a coach and that he continues to develop as a coach. “The wheels in his head are always turning, and he constantly tries to come up with ways to improve kids,” Breag says.
Vonk adapts his coaching style to suit the players with whom he is working, focusing on each one’s strong points. In an area that once had very few tennis courts, Vonk now has enough courts to handle the 40-plus students on his tennis teams. He has a system of A, B, and C junior varsity teams, if necessary, that give each person a chance to play. He also travels throughout Southeast Georgia giving camps and helping to develop programs, and he is involved with Camden’s middle school tennis, which has become a feeder program for the high school.
Since 2001, both the girls and boys teams have made the playoffs every year, including, for the girls team, trips to the quarterfinals in 2010, 2011, and 2012, and the Final Four in 2007, 2008, and 2013. Vonk was named the Professional Tennis Registry’s High School Coach of the Year in 2008 to go along with his U.S. Tennis Association’s Georgia High School Coach of the Year. In 2007, he was named a Racquet Sports Industry’s National Grassroots Champion of Tennis and received the United States Tennis Association’s “Starfish” No-Cut high school coach award.
This season, Vonk is hoping the girls and boys teams make it back to the state playoffs. The boys fell in the first round last year, but the girls made it all the way to the final four. “To make it back to the final four, which is like a state championship for South Georgia schools in tennis, was just really special,” says Vonk.
The season was made even more special because conflicts forced them to play without their number-one player for approximately half the season, including the region tournament. Expected to win, the Wildcats finished third, forcing them to travel for the playoffs. Including the region tournament, the Lady Wildcats spent four weeks on the road visiting and defeating Hillgrove, Westlake, and Harrison. The Wildcats fell to eventual girls state champion Walton, a metro-Atlanta school that has claimed 11 of the last 13 titles.
After facing the possibility of being unable to play, Vonk now loves being able to be on the tennis court every day. Once his career as a high school coach comes to an end, Vonk figures he will find a way to still be involved in junior tennis one way or another. No matter what, he will always have a connection to tennis.
“I figure I’ll probably die on the tennis court. I’ve accepted that that is just what I do,” he says.
The No-Cut Policy
Camden County Head Tennis Coach Dan Vonk hasn’t always been the easygoing coach with the no-cut policy. He started out at Baker County High in Florida as a tough-guy coach, forcing students to choose tennis above all other sports and even their jobs. One of those who had to choose work over tennis was Joseph Burtner. The two met again after graduation, and Burtner told Vonk how he had always wanted to continue playing tennis but had to get a job his senior year.
Not long after the two spoke, Burtner realized his dream of becoming a law enforcement officer. On December 12, 1995, Burtner, a rookie police officer with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, was shot and killed by a man during a suicide call that turned into an ambush. Burtner had been with the JSO for only six months.
Knowing that his former student had regretted not being able to play tennis his senior year, Vonk decided that he would no longer cut players or force them to choose tennis unless he absolutely had to, which has happened only once in 19 years. He has had as many as 62 players on his teams and regularly has more than 40. He was one of the first to have a no-cut program even before it was endorsed by national tennis organizations.
As he sees it, his job is to help students learn to be good, well-rounded people, using tennis to teach them. Each player must attend practice or make up any practices that are missed. Although most will likely never turn professional, Vonk wants them to learn respect for the game.
SE-CC-0414-Vonk
Coach’s Corner / Southeast / April 2014
Daniel Vonk
Camden County High School
Kingsland, Ga
By Rob Asbell
Photography by Jeffrey Griffith
Camden’s Tennis Guru
