SPRING ALL-AREA: Marsee repeats as LCR's Girls Tennis Player of the Year

LIVE OAK — Matti Marsee doesn’t exactly need an introduction. The list of her accomplishments needs an auctioneer-styled rundown to get through it all in a timely manner.

She’s a three-time state weightlifting champion, the NHSSCA Female Athlete of the Year, the Dairy Farmers Class 1A Girls Weightlifter of the Year, and was the 2021 Lake City Reporter’s Girls Weightlifter of the Year.

Marsee can add one more honorific to the pile now. In addition to her 2021 recognition for the same award, Marsee has earned the nod for the Lake City Reporter’s Girls Tennis Player of the Year for a second consecutive season after leading Suwannee with a 7-2 record in her singles matchups.

Not one to get enamored at the accolades, Marsee said the main purpose they serve her is getting her back to work with a more focused approach.

“I feel like it depends on the person,” Marsee said of how awards can effect someone. “Throughout high school, I’ve always said, ‘I don’t feel like I’ve done enough. I feel like I can do more, I need to do this and that.’ I’ve been very thankful for the awards, but I feel like they pushed me to try harder and prove to myself that I am deserving of it.”

It’s not like she has much left to prove, at least on the high school level. The SHS graduate has held the role of the Bulldogs’ No. 1 player for the past two seasons. And while she fell just short of her personal goal of an individual district title, it wasn’t for lack of want-to. She eventually fell in the district semifinals while playing in 90-plus degree heat back in mid-April at Palatka Junior-Senior High School. She said she knew her time was about up during the middle of that showdown.

“Probably the second set of the semifinal match,” Marsee said was the turning point. “I tried to play my hardest, because I knew I had a shot, and I knew our games were different. But I knew I could’ve beat her. It just wasn’t the right day.”

First-year head coach Damon Wooley will be the first in line to tell folks that representing her team in the manner Marsee has is a huge positive from his debut season. He said that having Marsee to lean on at some points was a best-case scenario for a rookie coach who previously taught golf.

“Whenever I came on board this year, everything that I saw with her and her teammates, whether it was Nellie (Lamb) and Caroline (Simpson), the seniors she played with, up to Jennifer Hancock, who was a brand new competitor out this year, Matti was always encouraging of her,” Wooley said. “When we would be playing matches, and if Jennifer even was playing an exhibition match, she would be watching her, encouraging her. She’s always been like that.”

Wooley would know. He’s known Marsee since she was born, having had previous personal and working relationships with her father, Dan. However, Wooley said that his expertise — or lack thereof — in tennis shouldn’t be considered in Matti’s story. Instead, he insisted all the credit go to two people: Marsee herself and coach Sydnie Sine, who was hired as additional help for Wooley near the beginning of the season.

“Matti is a great competitor and has a lot of heart,” Sine said in a text message. “She fought hard in all her matches and never let up. She’s an all-around excellent athlete who loves to be coached.”

Marsee also gave Sine her due credit for helping her own game progress.

“She (Sine) really helped me improve my serve, which is my favorite thing to do,” Marsee said. “I really enjoyed it the past couple of years, but this year, I think she helped me bring it up a notch.

“I would always drop my arm that I throw with too early, so the ball would never get as high as it should. But then she told me, ‘You gotta keep your arm up almost like you’re pointing at the ball, and immediately, that clicked.”

Marsee has a keen eye for both the past and the future. She remembers playing tennis with her father from around second grade and having those matches get a little too intense.

“We’re both very competitive,” she said. “There were times that we would just go home mad at each other, didn’t want to speak to each other which, two competitive people, it happens. But I think getting that competitive push when I was little — and now that I’m older — with my dad, I feel like it brings my whole family together a little bit more, because then we can go complain to my mom. And then she’ll be in on it and be like, ‘Guys, get over it.’”

As for the future, Marsee has some options open to her, but not for too long. She said she’ll need to decide soon between weightlifting scholarships from various schools and finishing up her associate’s degree before transferring to, preferably, Florida State. Either route she takes, Marsee said her goal is to get into upper-elementary teaching while also trying her own hand at coaching either weightlifting or tennis. The teaching mentality shouldn’t take too long to get into, as Marsee has already logged about 200 volunteer service hours with different elementary schools, where she even got the opportunity to fill in as the morning librarian. She also gets the chance this summer to work with kids as part of a Suwannee Parks and Recreation day camp.

However she decides to spend her next few years, Marsee has already accomplished a lot on her own and alongside her teammates at every step throughout high school. One particular night she remembers sums up how she experienced it all. During Suwannee’s Senior Night this season, she said every single girl on her team won their individual matchups.

“It’s not a super frequent thing, because it’s a building program,” she said. “But we all won, and we all got to celebrate together with our parents.

“It just meant a lot, being there together for the last time on the high school court, and all winning.”