Gavin Cooney

ONE THING YOU should know about tennis: ambitions held for years still have a habit of arriving as bolts from the blue. 

Mayo teenager Eoghan Jennings has spent the last month looking at the entry list for qualifying to this month’s Junior (U18) Australian Open. Entry is sorted according to world ranking and, at 129 in the world, Jennings was initially nowhere close to making the cut. But then a couple of players started dropping out, followed by a couple more, pushing Jennings up the list.

The withdrawals kept on coming but, four days ago, Jennings still found himself agonisingly on the wrong side of the cut line. That was until Tuesday, the final day before the entry list would be finalised, at which point there was the final dropout that pushed Jennings into qualifying. He had optimistically completed his visa paperwork weeks earlier, so now came a mad scramble for flights to Melbourne. Roughly €4,000 later, Jennings and his coach Garrett Barry are bound for Australia. 

“I still haven’t fully processed it,” Jennings told The 42 on Thursday from his departure gate at Dublin Airport. 

Jennings is the first Irish junior player since 2020 to compete at qualifying in Melbourne, and will need to win two matches to qualify and become the first Irish player to make the main draw since Simon Carr did so in 2017. 

Born in Dublin, Jennings moved to Westport in Mayo when he was young. (His father, Padraig, is from Ballyhaunis.) 

Though he played Gaelic football up to last year, Jennings’ primary love was tennis, first kindled at summer camps in Dublin and then in Mayo. “I started to love it,” he says, and he started taking private lessons until he was 11, at which point he started playing – and then winning – national tournaments. 

“My parents were never the pushy kind,” he says, “which I am very grateful for. It all came from me. I was putting myself under tonnes of pressure, and it got to the point where my parents were like, ‘Maybe you should quit.’”

Jennings remembers U10 and U11 tournaments at which he would convince himself he was such a red-hot favourite that everyone watching was there to see him win, and there was a point during matches at which the pressure would compound. “I’d panic halfway through the match, and then be in hysterics the whole way home,”

he says. “My parents got a bit sick of that, so I had to change.”

His progress was stymied by a 16-month lay-off with a stress fracture to his lower back, and Jennings admits he had “bagged” the idea of become an internationally-travelling pro. 

If his comeback was tentative, it didn’t remain so for too long. Jennings returned to the Irish junior scene and quickly won a trio of events, which persuaded him he was still ready for the road. 

He won events in Finland and the Cayman Islands just less than a month apart, and the following week reached the final of a tournament in Guatemala. He went on to play last year in Poland, South Africa, Bolivia, and, finally, Norway, gathering sufficient ranking points to squeeze his way into Melbourne. The absurd costs of this travel, he says, have been met by a series of kind and generous sponsors. 

Jennings is also doing all of this while living at home in Mayo. Ireland’s pro tennis record is testament to how tough it is to compete at the elite end of a truly international sport, and the odds are further stacked against anyone based on Ireland’s western seaboard. 

Though living in Westport, Jennings goes to St Gerald’s College in Castlebar, mainly because it’s next door to a tennis court. He is squeezing as much tennis into school life as possible, and is allowed do his own work on the court during PE classes, while given a half hour’s grace either side.

He hits with a former tennis pro, Daniel Glancy, who lives in Mayo, and does much of his physical work out of Emerald Wellness in Castlebar, where he can also avail of access to a chiropractor.

He meanwhile spends his weekends in Dublin, training out of the national tennis centre in DCU every Friday and Saturday, couch-surfing across the homes of friends and extended family. “I just have to get my hours in,” he says.

At 17, this is Jennings’ final year on the junior scene, and, now in fifth year, he plans to maximise his playing opportunities before prioritising his Leaving Cert in September. He has no plans to turn professional right out of school, and is instead eyeing a college place in the US, and competing in the NCAAs. 

“I don’t have any big, set goals”, he says. “Everyone dreams of playing Wimbledon and the US Open at senior level, but it takes so much work to get there, you also need a bit of luck with injury, and you have to be so committed and sacrifice so much.

“My goal is to play the four junior Slams this year, and hopefully play college tennis from there.”