Local tennis star, Lara van der Merwe, a Grade 11 learner at The High School for Girls Potchefstroom, has been selected for the SA National Squad and is currently ranked 258th in the World and eighth in Africa.
Lara has competed in many national and international tournaments this year. She works closely with her educators at Girls High to stay on top of her academics in her hectic schedule.
She recently competed in the African Junior Championships, achieving 16th position out of 60 top-seeded girls, and obtained the third place in the South African Junior Championships to put the cherry on the cake.
Lara also competed in the Junior Australian Open with the top 200 girls in the world and represented South Africa in the u.18 Interna- tional Games in Kenya where she came second in the singles. Before that, she travelled to Stellenbosch to play in the u.18 category against the top 30 players in South Africa.
She took the second place in the singles and a first place in the doubles.
Lara was part of the u.18 team that competed in the ITF/CAT African Junior Championships in Marrakesh. She also travelled to Botswana to compete in two international tennis tournaments. Sixteen foreign countries took part and Lara made the semi-finals for both singles and doubles in both competitions.
Lara is the only South African to reach the Top 4 in the first tournament and went on to finish second overall in the second tournament. She also competed in an u.18 International ITF Tournament in Namibia, where fourteen countries were represented and once again came home with a gold medal.
Most recently, Lara reached the finals of the Wanderers Junior ITF, an international junior world ranking tennis tournament at the Wanderers Club in Illovo, Johannesburg. She was then crowned champion of the Gauteng North Junior ITF at Groenkloof Tennis Stadium in Pretoria, beating Tshegofatso Tsiang 4-6 6-2 7-5 in the final.
