Inductees

On the south side of Kansas City, you’ll find yourself at the epicenter of tennis.

Tucked away on one side of the Pembroke Hill Ward Parkway Campus, you’ll come upon six – yes, six – newly renovated blue courts, complete with mesh netting and even vertical signs that detail the score.

However, to understand the magnitude of one of the state’s powerhouses, walk to a gymnasium in the heart of campus. There in the lobby, the trophy case is full of hardware.

In other words, this is home to a Show-Me State dynasty, and it’s why the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame proudly inducted the the Pembroke Hill School Boys Tennis Program with the Class of 2024.

Pembroke Hill has earned a state-best 43 top-four finishes in state tournament play. That includes a record 23 state championships, covering the following seasons: 1975, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2017, 2022, and 2023.

Hilliard Hughes coached the state title teams in the 1970s and into the 1980s. Karen Boulware led the state championship teams from 1988 to 1990, followed by Dale Eshelbrenner from 1991 to 2012, Justin Romick in 2017, and Scott Hanover for the past two seasons. Max Fearing coached for about five years in the early 1980s and later was Eshelbrenner’s longtime assistant.

Additionally, the program was a state runner-up seven times, earning 11 third-place and two fourth-place finishes.

The program has had six individual state champions, with John Rippey (1978, 1979, 1980) being a three-peat champion and Albin Polonyi winning in 1990 and 1991. Pembroke Hill has had 12 doubles champions, including four in the late 1960s.

All this for a program that is believed to have begun before World War II and won Kansas City district titles in 1968-1972, although the Kansas City championship teams did not advance to the state tournament.

Still, to understand Pembroke Hill’s tennis program, consider the story from Bart Bartleson of the Class of 1960. It says a lot about how building character was just as important as winning.

That season, Pembroke Hill went undefeated in the regular season, only to lose on a chilly day in the regional, against an opponent whose asphalt courts were crumbling and had chain-link nets, with lines that looked like shadows.

“You guessed it, we lost,” Bartleson said. “On the long ride home, coach Hughes was nonplussed, telling us that the sun would come up tomorrow. It did, and we all learned one of life’s lessons early, thanks to (Pembroke-Country Day) to lose gracefully and move on.”

The common denominator of so many Raider teams was the fundamentally sound play and mental toughness. After all, success over the years meant always taking the other team’s best shot, as if it were the US Open.

“Of the four-team state championships we won, the win over MICDS my freshman year was the most memorable,” said Will Welte, Class of 2012. “Although we ended up winning 5-2, every match came down to the wire, and it was one of the most competitive environments I’ve ever been a part of.”

Aroop Mukharji, a 2005 graduate, remembers the 2003 state championship, which came down to the third set of the No. 3 doubles match against John Burroughs of St. Louis. Mukharji and his doubles partner, Kirk Goza, never envisioned the state title hinging on their performance. But they pulled it off.

Perhaps that was no surprise, given that most Raiders trained almost year-round, with some of the top coaches in the Kansas City area.

As Welte explained, most players competed in national tournaments and trained together at the Kansas City United Tennis Academy (KCUT). In other words, they kept the expectations high, giving Pembroke Hill a physical and mental edge.

Over the years, their coaches also were not afraid to challenge them. Annually, the Raiders scheduled some of the best programs in Missouri and Kansas.

To Greg Wolf, a 1988 graduate, the competition within the team was something else. Pembroke Hill often had 35-man rosters.

“We had expectations of ourselves to win. Internally, there was a lot of competition just to get into the top six to play (varsity),” Wolf said. “There were a lot of really good players. And we had a lot of rivalries in terms of teams we played locally and externally outside of Kansas City.”

Said Kirkland Gates, who played in the 1960s, “The expectation was to win. We always shot for an undefeated season.”