Chris Mengel Senior Profile

DURHAM, N.C.- Recently, GoDuke.com sat down with senior Chris Mengel to learn more about the Pittsburgh, Pa. native.

GoDuke.com: When you think of Duke, what are some of the first things that come to your mind?
Chris Mengel: I think for me, it definitely has a special meaning because it's where I've wanted to play tennis since I was 11 or 12 years old. For me, it's always been positive: Great sports, great school. But really, it was a goal for such a long time that now I'm just really lucky to be here.

GoDuke.com: What made Duke stick out in your mind from the beginning?
CM: It probably started when I was six or seven, when I started liking Duke as a school for its basketball; I was a big basketball fan. And then, when I was about 11 or 12, I started wearing a Duke hat every day for about four or five years. I probably didn't take it off until I was about 16 years old.

GoDuke.com: What got you started playing tennis?
CM: I played every sport growing up. In the summers, I'd play baseball and swim. My mom swam competitively and my dad played basketball in college, so they were kind of pushing me in different directions. I hated swimming, and when baseball season would end, I'd have swimming for the rest of the summer. When I didn't want to do that anymore, that's when I actually started playing tennis.

GoDuke.com: What's been the best part about Duke tennis for you?
CM: From the perspective of a Duke student-athlete, just being friends with all the other athletes. The Duke student-athlete community is awesome; we get a lot of our friends out to support us and we try to support them as much as we can. So it's a pretty cool environment, everyone supports each other and obviously you spend a lot of time with your team, but all the teams are close to a certain extent, too.

GoDuke.com: What have your teammates meant to you during your time here?
CM: A lot. There's been some ups and downs for me, individually, from playing well at points during my career to having shoulder surgery and having to sit and watch. They're always pretty even keel; they always support you to do well. They might jokingly put you down, but when you're not playing so well they try to bring you back up. So they always try to keep you at a certain point, and I think they've been able to do that for me for the last four years, so I'm very thankful for that.

GoDuke.com: What does it mean to be the fifth-year guy in terms of leading the program?
CM: I think it's a little more responsibility. This is my fifth go-around, this is my fifth fall, so it seems like I've been here forever. It's half a decade of Duke tennis, so I definitely know exactly what this year is going to be like to a certain point since I 've been through it so many times. I'm just happy to be back playing. Last year was really tough, so I'm grateful I'm healthy enough to play now.

GoDuke.com: What's one lesson that you've learned from playing that you can carry over to all aspects of your life?
CM: If anything, you kind of have to step back and take a look at the bigger picture. A match you lose in September may feel like the end of the world, but it's about peaking in May and improving and hopefully doing better. You're going to lose matches to tons of good players in college and you might be frustrated, but you have to bounce back because there's always another match. It's the beauty of not playing tournament tennis. There's another match tomorrow, or next week. Until NCAA's, you still have another opportunity.

GoDuke.com: What's been one of your favorite trips you've gotten to take here?
CM: Definitely the Hawaii trips every year that we make. Big thank you to the Hills family for that. We've gone my first year and my third year, and we get to go again this year. So that's probably the number one reason I redshirted, that I get a third Hawaii trip out of my five years at Duke.

GoDuke.com: Off the court, what's one of your proudest academic achievements?
CM: Every year that I've been eligible, I've been on the All-ACC Academic team. I think I'm one of the only guys who have done that, so that's a pretty cool one.

GoDuke.com: What's one thing you want to accomplish this year?
CM: I think in past years, we've always been a little too results-oriented. I don't want to get away from that—I still want to win ACCs and have a chance to win NCAAs, and that's the ultimate goal, that's why we practice and why we play—but I think we need to focus more in the meantime on growing and getting better individually and as a team, and hopefully those end goals will take care of themselves.

GoDuke.com: Ten years from now when you look back on your time here with Duke tennis, what do you want people to remember about you?
CM: I hope that they'll remember that I was a competitor first, a guy that put the team first. I played through some injuries that maybe I shouldn't have, but I think that's part of the deal.

GoDuke.com: Since this is October, what's been your favorite Halloween costume?
CM: I have two of them, and I probably won't be able to live up to them ever again. My freshman year, Luke Marchese, Henrique Cunha, and I were Avatars. I was much taller than other two, and they got women's medium costumes. So they were skintight suits, and supposed to be head-to-toe, but really it only went about knee-to-neck for me. I ripped holes in it all throughout the night, so that was a disaster. Then my sophomore year, me and three of my roommates on the baseball team dressed up as babies and we had diapers, bibs, bonnets, and rattles. That was one of the coldest nights of my life. So those are the two that I still get a lot of grief for, but they were pretty funny.

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