National championship a four-gone conclusion for Carter

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This article was published 15/12/2010 (5723 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If Lee Carter decides to call it a career, there probably won’t be many tears shed by Canada’s elite wheelchair tennis players — after all, it may be the only chance they have of picking up a championship.

Carter, who grew up in St. Vital and now lives in West Kildonan, won national titles in both singles and doubles — with partner Corey Blatchford — for the fourth consecutive time last month in Niagara Falls.

“Whenever I play, of course I can tell that everyone wants to beat me,” said the 35-year-old Taylor Tennis Club member. “But I feel that the pressure is really on them, not on me.”

Once an active participant in hockey and baseball, Carter wasn’t interested in playing sports for years after losing both his legs in a 1996 industrial accident.

Finally, in 2003, a friend convinced him to try wheelchair basketball and later wheelchair tennis.

“I really enjoyed it, even though I had never played an individual sport before,” he said.

It didn’t take long for Carter to throw himself into the sport. A recreational pursuit quickly turned into a competitive passion as his game improved and he began to earn promising results in tournaments.

By 2006, Carter was on the national developmental team, with an eye toward the 2008 Paralympics. In 2007, he won his first national title, which he still says was his greatest accomplishment in the sport.

“It was so great to win,” Carter said of the 2007 nationals. “Being (ranked) No. 1 in Canada that year, I wanted to prove that I was the best at the biggest tournaments.”

Jared Connell, Carter’s coach for the last four years, has always been impressed by Carter’s athleticism on the court as well as his mental intensity.

With a lack of top-level wheelchair players in the province, Carter does most of his training against able-bodied opponents. He plays the ball on one bounce instead of the two bounces that are allowed in wheelchair tennis, although, he’s quick to point out, in most games that ball is moving too fast to let it bounce twice anyways.

“I train with him like I would an able-bodied player,” Connell said.

It would be easy to look at Carter’s resume and assume that he’s already looking ahead to the 2012 Paralympics in London (he had a disappointing first-round exit from the 2008 Games in Beijing), but that might not be the case.

“Working full-time and having a young family, it’s tough to train enough to be an elite player,” he said, adding that he took two years off work to travel and train in preparation for Beijing.

Carter has already committed to representing Canada next May at the World Team Cup, but beyond that he isn’t even sure if he has another national championship in him.

Tennis Canada has made no secret of their desire to take Carter to England, and Connell is confident that with the necessary work he could be very competitive on the world stage.

“He has the talent to be a contender for a medal at the Paralympic level,” Connell said. “But that depends on scheduling and how much he can play.”

The part of Carter that knows that he’s a better player than he was in Beijing would love another shot at the world’s best.

“Sports is so much about experience,” he said. “As much as you train, you can still be overwhelmed by how big (the Paralympics) is. That experience would really help.”

avi.saper@canstarnews.com