West Windsor resident loved teaching game; will remain an active player
By: Bob Nuse
For the 21 years Tom Dennery was the boys’ and girls’ tennis coach at Hamilton High, he was as much a teacher of the sport as he was a high school coach.
Quite often, players would come to the program at Hamilton with little or not tennis experience. But Dennery was always there to work with them and make them the best players he could.
"Hamilton has never been like Princeton, where so many of the kids grow up playing tennis," said Dennery, a longtime West Windsor resident who retired from teaching and coaching in June. "But we did have some teams that were competitive. We never really had the depth that some of these other programs had.
"We had some decent teams. The girls’ team we had a few years ago when we shared the Valley Division title was probably the best team we ever had. And we also had some girls that were very good individual players."
Dennery, a Trenton High graduate, never played tennis for the high school team. But he, like many of the players he would go on to coach, learned the game as a high schooler and grew to enjoy it very much.
"I didn’t start playing until I was in the ninth grade," said Dennery, who was a history teacher at Hamilton. "Trenton High had a very good tennis team back them. In the Junior 3 area where I grew up a lot of kids played tennis and had lessons. I took it up when I was in high school, but I never played on the team.
"I kept playing a lot after that, but then I stopped when I was teaching in Southern Michigan. I was playing more golf back then. Then I went to grad school at Michigan State and we had kids, so I started to play more tennis again because it takes a lot less time. Plus, I like tennis better than golf."
Now that he’s retired, Dennery will have even more time for tennis. He plays five days a week, including some leagues in the area. He has no intentions of slowing down now.
"I expect to keep playing as long as the body holds up," Dennery said. "I still play five times a week and I play in a couple of leagues. I run into a lot of the people I’ve coached over the years.
"It’s nice when you go out to the tennis courts and you see the kids that we had still playing. They liked to play tennis and it’s good to see that they’ve continued to play."
In his early days of coaching, Dennery had a chance to work with some top players. But he got just as much enjoyment working with the players who were still learning the sport while playing at the varsity level.
"We had some years where our teams weren’t that great, but the kids enjoyed playing," Dennery said. "A lot of times they would come to the team having never played before. And we often were going up against schools were the kids had been having lessons for years.
"When I first coached I had Jill Hutchinson, who is now Jill Hutchinson Blake. She was a top eight player in the state. But at the same time we had players in the county like Danielle Storace, Kristen Beske and Patty Dinella. That was a great time for girls’tennis in this area."
And despite never quite reaching the level of a Princeton or West Windsor, Dennery did quite well as a coach at Hamilton.
"For a decade or so there were no highly ranked players in the conference for the girls, so it gave us a chance to do well," he said. "The girl that played number for me the year we shared the Valley title didn’t even play until her sophomore year. She had never even picked up a racket until she was a freshman in high school. By her senior year, she was the second best player in the CVC."
Those are the kinds of strides that made it so worthwhile for Dennery, Whether the program was competing for a Valley title or just trying to compete.

