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TSC Göttingen: Armin Trklja moves to a college team in Georgia
Göttingen. With the semi-finals in the men’s field of the national tennis championships, Armin Trklja says goodbye to the USA. After graduating from the Max Planck High School, the number one in the Oberliga team at TSC Göttingen decided to study overseas for a year and play college tennis there.
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In the heavily occupied men’s field, Trklja played his way into the semi-finals as an unseeded player. A clear 6:2 and 6:2 against Noel Bartz (Braunschweiger THC) was followed by a 6:0 and 7:5 against Henri Schubert (TC Rot-Weiß Hildesheim), who was eighth. In the quarter-finals Arkadiy Kharenko from Oldenburger TeV was waiting, whom the man from Göttingen defeated in two hard-fought sets (6:4, 7:5). The end of the line in the semi-finals was Serign Samba from Club zur Vahr Bremen, who was sixth seeded and whom Trklja narrowly lost 5:7 and 6:3. The national champion was Dominik Bartels (TC RW Hildesheim), who defeated Samba in the final 6:2 and 7:6.
The TSCer was satisfied with his performance at the championships, as he had not been able to play many tournaments this year. Only the league games in the hall and a tournament in Augsburg were possible because an operation on his thumb had forced him to pause for seven weeks. “And the league games didn’t go so well for our team either. We had a lot of departures, unfortunately that’s the way it is in a student town,” says Trklja, who had reduced his sports program a bit because of his Abitur.
It is no coincidence that the 19-year-old enrolled at the university that his sister Neila also attended from summer 2019 until the outbreak of the corona pandemic in spring 2020. In the first two weeks of August, the tennis player will be heading to Georgia to start the International Business course at Columbus State University and to play a lot of tennis. Back then, his sister had applied for a place – without the support of a placement agency. Armin Trklja has now used the good contacts: “I visited my sister back then and therefore already knew the coach and also some of the players. So it won’t be a completely new beginning for me.” With English as a written examination subject in the Abitur, he also feels “quite confident” as far as the language is concerned.
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In terms of sport, he wants to improve and “take the next step”. His dream is still “to play more professionally”. In the first semester, you train and work on your fitness. Individual tournaments are also played. The team tournaments, which initially begin at regional level, then follow in the second semester.
Trklja will live in a dormitory on campus – together with an Italian who is part of his tennis team and is also a newcomer. “We’ve already written that it will definitely be good,” says the 19-year-old with great optimism as he looks back on his year abroad, which will most likely be followed by a teacher’s degree in Germany. Here, too, he is following in the footsteps of his sister, who is studying Spanish and sports and is going to Spain for a year in late summer to study. “It’s going to be pretty quiet for my parents at home,” Armin Trklja suspects.
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