As the champion of two area tournaments in the beginning of her high school career, Amberly Cheng enters her senior year as the highest ranked singles player in Diamond Bar High School’s varsity girls tennis team.

Cheng began playing tennis around fifth grade when her mother enrolled her in tennis group lessons. It wasn’t until eighth grade when Cheng began to take the sport seriously and compete in a couple of tournaments.

“My first sport was actually swimming, but then every time I finished a swim season, I would gain like 20 pounds. So my mom pulled me out of swimming, and I guess tennis was the only sport that stuck with me,” Cheng said.

When Cheng made the junior varsity tennis team as a freshman, she was actually relieved that she didn’t get on varsity.

“The varsity team was super competitive, so then even if I got onto varsity my first year, I wouldn’t get as much playing time. Since I was on JV my first year, I got to play every game and against different people,” Cheng said.

Cheng began playing in varsity in her sophomore year, but it wasn’t until her junior and senior year when she went through a lot of hardships.

“I had a lot of bad things happening to me like how parents [on the sidelines] would be saying [critical] things behind my back. At first I let that get to me, but then after that, I learned that it was really immature. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what they say about you, it is how you perceive yourself and how you show them that you have good sportsmanship,” Cheng said.

Over the course of her high school career as a tennis player, Cheng won first place in the Lakewood Open & Junior Satellite and the 22nd Annual So Cal Christmas Junior Satellite and was then invited to the Satellite Masters tournament, where she didn’t go very far. She recently participated in the 2014 Palm Valley Martin Luther King Jr. Open Tournament and reached the quarterfinals.

Cheng hopes to lengthen her tennis career and play at the collegiate level. She is determined to earn a scholarship, but if she doesn’t, then Cheng won’t hesitate to do a walk-on.

“I don’t want to stop. I like having the competitiveness, but then I don’t want to join a club where there’s no competition. I want there to be someone better that I have to go over to be even better than they are,” Cheng said.
Cheng aspires to become an assistant physician and work her way up to her ultimate dream: a surgeon. She wants to change the lives of others and make an impact to those around her.

After all these years, the game of tennis is still an enigma to Cheng. There are days when she absolutely hates it and wonders why she’s even doing this, but there are days when hitting the ball feels just right to her.

“I feel like there’s nothing I need to worry about. I can just concentrate on the one thing [tennis]. The real moments I carry with me through my entire career is the experience and downfalls that I met. Always walk with pride, you’ve already made it this far,” Cheng said.