Girls Preparatory School has had the most TSSAA girls’ tennis singles state champions, and the first of those, Kappie Clark Boles in 1973, is going into the Tennessee Tennis Hall of Fame on Dec. 4 in Nashville.
Boles, who has lived the past 20 years in Texas, will be inducted along with longtime Knoxville teaching professional Dana Royal Forsyth in the 7 p.m. CST dinner at the Holiday Inn Nashville Vanderbilt. Attendance costs $75, and reservations must be made by Nov. 26 through 615-357-1002 or 800-521-4936.
“I know Dana, and I was so happy when I heard I would be going in with her,” Boles said this past week from her Houston home. “I have very warm recollections of her.”
She is even happier to be joining her father, Warren Clark, and friends such as Susan Hill Whitson, Wes Cash and Elizabeth Sharp Henderson in the state tennis hall of fame. Henderson, who grew up in Knoxville before starring at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, was a frequent juniors doubles partner of Boles, who began playing tennis at the age of 8 at the Lookout Mountain Commons.
“This is a huge, huge honor – and such a big surprise,” Boles said of her hall selection. “I’ll be in very good company with the people who already have been inducted. It’s a wonderful roster of people I have long admired.”
She won national super seniors and ultra seniors father-daughter titles with her dad, now 83, in 2004 and ’08, and she won a prestigious open doubles title in Memphis with her younger sister, Sholar, earlier this decade.
“That was a big win. It was very exciting,” Boles said.
She was on the GPS varsity from the seventh through the 12th grades and was part of multiple state championship teams when there were no divisions. She was the Bruisers’ No. 1 player from the eighth grade on and was a co-captain her last three years.
Graduating in 1976, she was recruited to the University of Virginia, which wound up 12th in the nation her sophomore year. And then came Title IX and a sudden infusion of money in the program. She and her teammates went from playing for the reluctant men’s coach and wearing “orange pumpkin” sweat suits “that had been worn a million times” to getting their own coach and “snazzy navy” Adidas attire.
“That was a really neat thing, seeing how dramatically your world can change,” said Boles, who was Virginia’s captain and MVP her senior year.
In Houston she has provided volunteer coaching for St. John’s School and played in and helped organize Sunshine Kids tennis tournaments benefiting M.D. Anderson pediatric cancer patients, among other charity events.