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Lucy Weiniger is a 21-year-old tennis player currently competing in BUCS for the University of Birmingham. With Lucy in her third and final year of her law degree, balancing her studies, as well as her commitment to train with the team almost every day is a struggle. However, she is determined to complete a strong campaign, after an already promising start to the season.
Lucy’s introduction to tennis started very early, “I’ve been playing tennis for basically as long as I can remember, I think as soon as I could walk, I was holding a tennis racket.” Playing often with her mum, in addition to weekly lessons gave Lucy a breadth of tennis experience, which would stand her in good stead for the rest of her career.
Despite having started playing from such a young age, Lucy said that tennis wasn’t something she took too seriously until last year, where she was able to get her coaching qualification. Lucy told me that around this time, she “actually fell in love with playing, and started taking it a lot more seriously.” Last year prompted a significant change in Lucy’s outlook on competitive tennis, as she started working extremely hard on her game in order to secure her place in the Birmingham fourth team squad for the following year.
Having put so much work into tennis despite the obvious workload burdens a law degree entails, Lucy described the feeling of finally breaking into the squad as “incredible.” Stepping up to this level was always going to be intense though. “It’s quite difficult having to go from first and second year playing 2 or 3 times a week, to now waking up at 6am most days to go to training.” Speaking with Lucy, she said that although having to balance lectures and training has been intense, that “it’s been really fun and an incredible experience, I’ve loved every moment.”
The start to the BUCS season has been everything Lucy would have hoped for, since losing to Nottingham in the opening fixture, Lucy remains unbeaten, and impressive performances have earnt her regular call ups to the third team. The third team currently sit third and fourth team sixth in the league table, and with this promising start, Lucy remains confident of a strong remainder of the campaign, with title ambitions surely on the horizon. When asked about her personal ambitions for this season, she said “I just really want to improve my competitive game, especially the mental aspect of it, which is really difficult.”
Lucy intends to continue competing at a high level, but with a plan to move to Israel next year, she is not entirely sure of what the future will hold. When speaking about
her decision to make Aliyah, Lucy said “I’ve always wanted to move to Israel, I did an internship there last summer in an Israeli law firm and decided that this was right for me.”
With a plan to continue coaching, as well as focusing on her academics during her time in Israel, a competitive career is not at the forefront of Lucy’s mind, however she is still open to competing once she has settled. For now, though, she is focused solely on this year, “we don’t have that many games left of the season, so we just want to win as many as we can.”
Being able to represent the Jewish community in sports is important for Lucy, and her religion remains a key part of her identity. She has previously been Birmingham JSOC president, and continues to make an effort to attend Friday night services at university, taking time out of her sporting schedule in order to embrace her religion. Her feeling of pride has only strengthened in the last few months, with antisemitism becoming particularly prevalent around the UK, but also on university campuses.
Lucy commented that tennis has also become a welcome distraction to much of the news that surrounds the current situation.
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