Story's new chapter
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Leaving a 16-year-old daughter at a tennis academy 3,000 miles from home was tough enough.
Gusts made the goodbye even harder as a Category 5 hurricane touched down in Florida the week Story Tweedie-Yates enrolled at Saddlebrook Academy, north of Tampa, Fla.
The storm generated 155-mph winds and state-wide fear as coastal towns were evacuated. Mom left on a plane, tears falling like raindrops from the storm. She called the school to ask about emergency plans, then called her daughter so often that Story turned off her cell phone.
"All I could envision was a huge wave covering the whole state," mother Linda Tweedie said.
Two years later, neither remember the name of the storm, which didn't damage the school. It was just one of five storm warnings that Tweedie-Yates endured at Saddlebrook. In May 2000, she began storming through the girls tennis summer circuit. Not quite a Category 5, but enough to earn national attention.
She played in four national tennis tournaments last summer, placing sixth or better in three of them. Her national ranking had climbed from the 90s to No. 8 by November, when she was back at Overlake School in Redmond, beginning her senior year.
She watched her ranking rise on the Internet. First, to No. 23 in the country, then into the teens and finally to her current status as the best tennis player in the state to never win a state title.
She never had the chance, as she played other sports as a freshman and sophomore at Overlake and spent her junior year in Florida.
High-school tennis didn't fit a schedule packed with more than sports. She played the piano, sings in a choral group and is learning a second foreign language. She has modeled and tried acting, but her only callback was for "Forrest Gump." She auditioned for the part of young Jenny, the character who gets along with Forrest like peas and carrots.
Turns out tennis was that fit for Tweedie-Yates, and this week she will end her high-school career by playing in her first state tournament. She hasn't lost a set this high-school season and is the top-seeded player entering the Class A/B tournament in Yakima on Friday and Saturday.
She is headed to Stanford next fall, one of two women's tennis players offered a full-ride scholarship by the Pac-10 school with an academic reputation exceeded only by its tennis pedigree. Yesterday, the Cardinal won its 11th NCAA title in women's tennis, its third in the past five years.
Last week at a tri-district tournament, Tweedie-Yates beat sophomore Taryn Anderson, the defending state champion from Annie Wright School. More than 50 people watched as Tweedie-Yates won 7-5, 6-3, handing Anderson her first high-school loss. Anderson, two years younger, had looked up to Tweedie-Yates for four years but had never met her until the tournament.
"When we went 7-5, I just thought, `All right, I'm hanging with a Stanford player,' " Anderson said.
Anderson is ranked No. 5 among 16-and-under girls in the Northwest, but competitive matches like that are rare in a region that has more rain than ranked players. That was the biggest reason behind Tweedie-Yates' decision to attend Saddlebrook.
"There's no magic bullet," her mother said. "There is only one way I believe to improve in tennis - hitting against a lot of different people. You could tell that she had hit hundreds of different tennis balls."
All of Tweedie-Yates' roommates were from different countries - New Zealand, Japan, England, Bermuda and the Bahamas.
Tweedie-Yates' initial commitment was for six months, but she stayed a whole school year, always intending to return to Overlake for her senior season.
The scholarship to Stanford didn't surprise older brother Sage, now a sophomore at Denver University.
"In my mind, it was a given that Story was going to the Stanford or Harvard of the world," he said. "We knew that Story could do whatever she wanted. She wanted to go to the best school possible, and she's just that kind of person."
Sage first saw the determination at school, where his sister was always focused on grades, and then on the tennis court, where she was always the youngest player in their instructional groups.
They started the modeling and acting lessons together, and Sage was chosen for an AT&T commercial that aired in Canada. Both played piano, too, and tried the clarinet.
Sage won a state singles title as a freshman at Overlake and qualified for the national championships that summer. But he stopped playing the sport after that, choosing to play soccer, basketball and compete in track at Overlake his final three years.
Story tried other sports, too. She played soccer her first two years at Overlake. Tried lacrosse, too, but tennis was the sport that was the best fit.
"I found out I would rather really excel at one sport than be good at a bunch of them," she said.
She had played in regional and national tournaments since she was 12, but was never ranked higher than 30th nationally before enrolling at Saddlebrook.
"I wanted to focus on the tennis," she said. "To focus on me, to do something really cool and help myself."
A great opportunity for her and an emptier house for her family, which had two of four children move away within a month. Parents Linda Tweedie and Alan Yates, a Microsoft executive, also have 9-year-old twin boys, Scout and Sky.
"The house got very quiet, very quickly," Linda Tweedie said. "We felt her absence greatly, but we knew what she was doing was right for her."
A school year that started with a storm and ended with a scholarship.
Danny O'Neil can be reached at 206-515-5536 or doneil@seattletimes.com.