FORTVILLE — Alexis Lane isn’t superstitious. She’s competitively stubborn, and her firmly-fastened Adidas tennis shoes echo her philosophical commitment.
“I, personally, tie my shoes for the first match at the beginning of the (tennis) season, and then after that I don’t untie them,” Lane said. “That’s what I would do.”
A four-year varsity girls tennis player at Mt. Vernon High School, Lane loves to win, hates to lose and lives to persevere.
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That includes her double-knotted laces.
“I think some of them would get loose sometimes, and I would tighten them up and hope it didn’t fall apart because my mom was not in the business of buying me a new pair of shoes in the middle of the season,” Lane said.
Lane, who will attend Indiana University this fall, has her preferences. They keep her focused and on top of her game.
When Mt. Vernon veteran tennis coach Gabe Muterspaugh first met Lane she was a seventh-grader attending Marauders summer tennis camp six years ago. From the beginning, he knew exactly what she could bring to the court.
A late starter to the sport, Lane first swung her racquet in the sixth grade while enrolled in MSD Lawrence Township before transferring over to Mt. Vernon where she worked with Muterspaugh in the summer.
Lane split time between tennis and softball initially as a youth. But, like her mother, Cathy, who played tennis at Highland High School in Lake County, Lane knew what sport she wanted to embrace.
And, what sport she didn’t want.
“I didn’t want the (soft)ball to hit me. I was terrified of it,” Lane recalled with a laugh.
Instead, she made her living crushing a tennis ball with a powerful backhand as a doubles players the past three seasons until the coronavirus pandemic robbed her of a 2020 finale.
“I knew she was a good athlete. She started coming over to camp in eighth grade. I knew she was feisty. I knew she had fight,” Muterspaugh said.
Her intensity led to a opportunity her freshman season when she was promoted to No. 1 doubles with former Marauder Emily Annakin during the Hancock County Tennis Tournament in the spring of 2017.
“It was very surprising her freshman year to play varsity. It wasn’t something we expected. She had started out when she started playing sports splitting time between softball and tennis,” Cathy Lane said.
Her lack of experience was balanced out by her relentless drive, and it led to a win in her first varsity match. Over the years, she won two of three county championship matches as a doubles player and three sectional title matches.
In three years on the varsity roster, Lane and the Marauders went 55-9 as a team to capture nine consecutive county team titles and six straight sectional team championships.
“She ended up winning against New Pal. That was her indoctrination to varsity at county her freshman year. She didn’t even know what was going on,” Muterspaugh said.
She didn’t realize how much her and Muterspaugh were alike either.
Set in their ways, the twosome shared many of the same traits. They respected each other off and on the court — most of the time.
“When you’re at JV with me, I’m like Santa Claus. It’s unicorns and ice cream, then it all changes when you get on those varsity courts,” Muterspaugh joked. “I think she was wondering after we brought her up, what the heck happened?”
With 26-years of coaching experience, Muterspaugh expects the most out of his players. Tough love is his motto, but it also meant meeting his match from time to time with Lane.
“It definitely was a little bit of a shock freshman year. I had never had a coach that pushed me that hard. One of my earliest memories of Gabe was playing with Emily at the match right after county. I was playing really bad, and I remember he came up and was like, ‘You’re not on JV anymore.’ That was a whole different thing for me,” Lane said.
“It started out pretty intense, but as the years went on, you get used to it and you learn that it’s for your own good, really.”
It was a mutual period of growth, Muterspaugh admitted. Sometimes, the two wouldn’t see eye to eye. Other times, they would find themselves on opposite sides of the ravine.
“They love to hate each other. They love each other in the offseason and then they can’t stand each other in season,” Cathy Lane laughed. “But, it’s not the whole season. There’s just bits and pieces.
“Her and him are very much alike in personality. So, neither one of them is wrong ever. Because neither of them is wrong, they seem to have a little bit of fight because of that.”
Several times, Cathy would listen to her daughter vent on the ride home from practice, considering quitting tennis until her mom reeled her back in.
Muterspaugh figured out he had to alter his approach with Lane, while finding a way to get her to be her best.
“I’m always tougher on people I expect a lot out of, and she is as tough as nails. Sometimes she didn’t like to hear what I said, I didn’t like to hear what she said,” Muterspaugh said.
“Freshman year, jumping from JV to varsity, the expectations are increased a lot,” Lane added. “You have a lot more, so when you’re on JV, it’s more, ‘It’s OK, try again.’ On varsity, it’s ‘You need to do better.’ We had some points where we came together and we figured out a better way to do things.”
The goal was winning, and both were able to find a middle ground, and it netted victories with Cathy and the Marauders assistant coaches keeping both coach and player on the same path.
Lane’s body, however, didn’t always agree even when Muterspaugh and her did.
Diagnosed with a strained ligament at the Sacroiliac joint, which is located between the iliac bones and the sacrum, connecting the spine to the hip, Lane dealt with chronic pain.
“She has a lot of back issues. She has a strained SI joint that she has to get a cortisone shot for once a year,” Cathy Lane said. “We generally did it right before season to help her get through the season.”
Any sort of twisting, turning, lateral movement or hitting motion would aggravate the SI joint and send pain through her back.
“She struggled pretty much the entire time. The shot helps, but it doesn’t make all the pain go away. She was in the trainer’s office pretty much every day before practice and matches,” Cathy Lane said. “After matches, she would go and have ice packs on her back to help alleviate some of the swelling and pain. On top of that, we pretty much did everything. We did physical therapy, chiropractic. The chiropractic continued along with the cortisone because it gave her some relief.”
Surgery wasn’t an option, according to the doctors, Cathy Lane said, and there were no guarantees a procedure would work, if the family elected to have the injury corrected.
“It’s the ligaments, but it wasn’t bad enough for them to repair. It’s not really something unless it’s torn that they want to do,” Cathy Lane said. “We kind of limped along to get her from season to season.”
The injury impacted her sophomore season as her play suffered from the strain, which led to a demotion back to junior varsity for half of the year.
Muterspaugh never gave up on Lane, and she didn’t give in either. As usual, they were both on the same page, just in different ways.
“Her sophomore year, she had that sophomore slump. It was brutal on her. She wanted to quit every night,” Muterspaugh said. “She was playing JV after we kind of expected her to be an all-year varsity player. She only played about half the year at JV, and that was a tough thing to go through.”
Humbling for Lane, the setback sparked the future senior team captain to find herself and her game.
“I have small tears, so that was kind of a struggle most of my career. I remember one of the early practices, we were doing conditioning and I started crying because it hurt so bad. I felt so bad because I wanted to give my all for the team and I couldn’t,” Lane said.
“As much as I hated to play JV, I think it was good to see that I wasn’t just going to stay on varsity. You have to continually put in effort.”
Fortunately, Lane doesn’t know how to go halfway.
Last year, she nearly replicated her decorated freshman season when she was named All-Hoosier Heritage Conference, All-District and honorable mention All-State.
As a senior, she was prepared to take charge as the team’s lone senior varsity starter, but she didn’t get her chance. And, it was hard to accept.
“I knew great things were going to happen. I knew we were going to win, and she was so fired up to lead the younger group,” Muterspaugh said.
“That was a big thing for her. She hated to lose. When she did, she’s very emotional, and kind of the same as me. She’s somebody who is so close in the same kind of reaction, you’re going to butt heads. And, that’s exactly what we did, but we both wanted the same thing and were ready for it this spring.”
While her career is over with a pre-med track ahead of her in Bloomington, Lane plans to return to Fortville to work with Muterspaugh again as a tennis camp volunteer.
“When I started out it was a lot of adversity with the injury and then Gabe not understanding how to coach me in the beginning,” Lane laughed. “But after not having this season, it’s kind of easier for me to see all the times they pushed me or yelled or made me run laps, it helped me be a better player.
“It helped me, not even with tennis, push through things or pushing myself more than I normally would,” she added. “I think that playing tennis helped me a lot with my everyday life.”
