Big Difference

Dana Hills junior Brian Kent swears he’s trying to bulk up, even if he still looks like he’s missing a few meals.

“I eat a ton and I lift weights, but I don’t see a difference at all,” said Kent, who stands 6 feet 1 and weighs 145 pounds.

Fortunately for Kent, he’s improving his tennis game at a faster rate than he’s putting on weight. Kent won about 75% of his matches last year, but he did so by keeping the ball in the play and staying back. When he faced a top-notch player, he usually lost.

“Even if I was playing well, I would hope the other person would play bad,” Kent said. “This year, I think that if I play well, no one can beat me.”

That mentality, a new racket and a new coach have added up to big things this season for Kent and Dana Hills. He has won 54 of 55 sets for undefeated and top-ranked Dana Hills (20-0), which was supposed to be rebuilding this season.

With four-year starter Brandon Fallon graduating, the Dolphins appeared to be lacking a dominant singles player. They also had holes at No. 1 doubles and No. 2 singles, with Kent moving to No. 1 singles.

But some strange things started happening over the summer. Kent began finding his game with his new racket and his new coach, Bill Korsak of Irvine, and exchange student Javier Carillo arrived from Venezuela.

“If you’d have told me our team would have been this good, I would have said, ‘That’s not a possibility,’ ” Kent said.

Carillo has been nearly as solid as Kent, losing only three sets out of 49. In fact, Carillo beat Kent twice during practice matches and won the right to represent Dana Hills in the interscholastic singles division at Ojai. Carillo proved his worth by pulling two early upsets and reaching the round of 16.

“Javier has been great, but Brian’s been a little more consistent all year,” Dana Hills Coach John Stephens said.

Kent he owes much of that consistency to Carillo.

“He’s such a different type of player than I am,” Kent said. “He gets to everything and he likes to stay back more than I do. It’s nice to play someone whose game is the opposite of mine.”

It wasn’t that long ago that’s Kent game looked a lot like Carillo’s except for the quickness and the top-spin. Kent knew he needed a change.

“I had been working with some coaches around here and I figured I wasn’t going anywhere,” he said. “It seemed like all they wanted me to do was keep the ball in play. I always like to play aggressively, but I wasn’t a good enough to do it. I didn’t have the skills.”

But that began to change when Kent began working with Korsak nine months ago.

“We’ve basically taken his serve apart and started from scratch,” said Karsak. “We took him from a kicker serve to the left and we moved [his toss] to the right side of his head where the power is. We’ve worked on his volleys too, which were nonexistent when we started.”

Last year, Kent’s serve would occasionally hit 100 mph. This year, he says he’s whipping his serve at a rate of 115 to 120 mph.

“That’s changed everything,” Kent said.

Said Korsak: “It’s almost a 50-50 proposition on the baseline. You’re going to miss or he’s to miss. When you come into the net, you force the action. Brian was courageous enough to say, ‘I’m going to have to take my game to another level if I’m going to play college tennis.’ ”

The final ingredient to Kent’s new game came last summer after he broke a string during a workout.

“I had to borrow another guy’s racket,” Kent said. “I loved the feel of it. From that day on, I decided to stick with the new racquet. It’s lighter than my old one and I have more power and more control.”

Whether it’s the racket, the new coach or newfound confidence, Kent is a definitely different player--even with his gangly frame.

“He’s definitely taken his game to another level,” Stephens said. “He’s very capable of beating the top players now.”

Kent has lost only to Mission Viejo’s Eric Bachelor, but he will see more top players this weekend at the Southern Section individual preliminaries. One player Kent isn’t looking forward to facing is Servite’s Ryan Moore, last year’s section singles champion and this year’s Ojai champion.

“I expect myself to do fairly well, but I don’t know if anyone’s going to beat Ryan Moore,” Kent said. “He’s on another level right now. I have so much respect for him.”