Junior Player Spotlight: Mark Persaud, Point Set Tennis

Nearly every day of the week, Mark Persaud and his father make the drive from Queens Village to Point Set Racquet Club in Oceanside. It’s a trip they have made four days a week for the last several years as Persaud continues his tennis development and climb the ranks of top junior players in the USTA Eastern Section and the Metro Region.

“It’s about a 20 minute drive depending on traffic,” Persaud said. “I would definitely say it’s worth it. There’s a great group of players there. We all have our mind on the same thing, and that’s improving.”

Persaud is a top junior in the Boys 16s division in Eastern with a UTR north of 8. His introduction to tennis came the way a lot of young people begin playing. His parents were looking for something active for Mark to do, and decided to enroll him in group lessons at Cunningham Park Tennis Center near where he lives in Queens. He also played soccer at the time, but after experiencing the joy and thrill of tennis, it quickly became his true passion and the sport he wanted to focus his attention on.

“I played both sports until I was nine-years-old, but I realized how much I loved tennis,” he recalls. “I think it’s because it’s such an individual sport, and there’s so much you can do with it. I felt like soccer was just passing and scoring, but in tennis you can slice, hit a drop shot, use different spins, and I just decided to stick with it.”

A memorable moment that validated that decision for him was winning a tournament, his first and that winning feeling stayed with him.

As he got older, he wanted to continue to push himself to be the best tennis player he could be, and that’s when he met Danny Casesa of Point Set Tennis. The two were introduced to each other through Persaud’s coach at the time who recommended Casesa to Persaud as a way to further his development.

Casesa gave him a blunt assessment of his game, which was something that Persaud and his family wanted:

“When I met him and he first saw me play, he told me there was a lot of stuff I needed to fix,” Persaud recalls with a laugh. “He really liked me as a player but my technique needed some work. I could tell he knew the game and knew what I had to do to improve. He was straight to the point, and the most honest coach I had met. I had never really heard that before from a coach, so he really inspired me to work harder and do better.”

While some young players and their families would rather hear all positives from their coaches, Persaud met the challenge head on and knew Casesa was who he wanted to coach him. So for the last three years, Persaud and his father have made that drive out to Oceanside to train with him and within Point Set’s junior programs.

Persaud joined the club’s advanced program and quickly found himself competing and training with players who were a couple of years older than him. He was 13-years-old at the time, and so he had to adjust on the fly.

“It showed me there’s a whole different game, a whole different level to the one I was playing before,” Persaud says. “We trained in a small group of about four or five players, and I was really able to connect with not just them, but everyone at Point Set. The whole team there is nice and supportive, and we communicate well together.”

Training with like-minded players that are older than he is has allowed Persaud to learn a lot about his own game, and opened his eyes to the areas where he needs to improve in order to elevate to the next level. He takes part in those intimate group lessons on Mondays and Wednesdays, while doing fitness on Tuesdays. On Thursdays is when he has private lessons with Casesa.

Persaud is a player who relies on his variety, utilizing a mix of slices and spins to push his opponents and keep them guessing. His goal in matches, he says, is to make it as difficult as possible on his opponents. Persaud likes to serve-and-volley when possible as well.

He admits though:

“I think I need to work on my mental game. Because sometimes I get stuck on a point that I lost, or a game that I lost, and I want to get better at blocking those out and moving on to the next.”

As Persaud has continued to improve in his training and working alongside Casesa at Point Set, his next goal in the short term is to translate that work into tournament titles.

“I want to win a title in the near future, and at least make consistent deep runs at the tournaments I play,” he said. “It’s come to the point where I have to start showing some positive results. I play L3s and L4s mostly, and I am ready to go deeper in those events.”

When Persaud isn’t training for tennis, he is someone who puts a great emphasis on his academics and spends a lot of time studying for his classes. He loves to remain active even off the court, spending much of his free time throwing the football around with his father, or playing basketball and soccer with his friends. Persaud is big into fitness and spends much of his downtime working out, or swimming on weekends when he isn’t playing in a tournament. His conditioning and fitness will go a long way to helping him achieve his tennis goals both in the short term and the long term.

“Mark is always looking to add more elements to his game, and it’s one of the things that makes him so coachable,” said Casesa. “He’s someone who is comfortable being uncomfortable, and he puts in a lot of time to branch out and get out of his comfort zone in order to improve. He and I will put on the Swing Vision and we go through things after we train or he plays a practice match, and we break down what happened and how to learn from it. I’m proud of his development up to this point and he is always looking for feedback to continue that development.”