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Miami Palmetto High School senior Elizaveta Kozlova spent her summer playing and coaching tennis. She started playing tennis at six and played up until COVID shut things down. She put her tennis ambitions on hold for a couple of years but returned to the game last year, practicing daily and taking lessons.
“Sometimes you have to give yourself a break,” she says. “It’s a lot of effort, a lot of
time.”
Kozlova is originally from Russia. She and her family moved to Oregon when she was five. There, she played tennis but did not have a coach. Her time in Oregon was not idyllic. She was bullied and COVID made things worse.
She moved to Miami just before her sophomore year. Miami (and Palmetto) has been a
better fit for her. She’s made friends and she’s not bullied here.
“I’m more a big city person,” she says. “We moved, since then I was just feeling better. I
made a lot of friends since and made wonderful memories last year.”
In the Fall of 2021, she started practicing tennis at Dante Fascell Park.
“I needed some support,” she says. “It was my passion. I want to do sports. I did love
tennis so much, I didn’t want to give up a sport that I loved.”
Her coach tells her that she’s never going to drop the sport again. She says he saw that
she loves the sport.
“Now, I don’t want to quit,” she says. “”My coach made a plan for me to increase my game to another level.”
She also enters tournaments. She’s improving with each event and took third place at a
Level Seven Tournament in Broward earlier this year.
When her coach needs additional coaches, she steps in, working with kids as young as
four and as old as 8-10.
Coaching the little ones helps her get a better handle on the areas she needs to work
on.
“I get to catch mistakes and understand possible mistakes,” she says.
She joined the Palmetto Tennis team last year although she didn’t play much. She says
that’s because she wasn’t in top tennis shape yet.
“I’m glad I got on the team,” she says. “It’s an improvement on my side. Last year I
didn’t do a lot of things, this year I did more.”
She expects to be in the top six seeds in the coming tennis season.
When the Palmetto team went to the State Championship, Kozlova didn’t play but she
was thrilled for the team. However, on June 5, her club team won the state title and she
played winning doubles matches to help seal the win. She says she didnt expect herself to do so well.”
At Palmetto, last year Kozlova was vice president of DECA, a club that works to prepare
students for leadership roles in areas such as finance, hospitality, marketing, and
management.
In fact, Kozlova was named the Outstanding Junior Business Education Student last
year.
She considers herself a shy person, so she feels being vice president of DECA helped
her become more confident.
“I like helping others,” she says. “I like being around people.”
Kozlova hopes to play tennis in college. She plans to apply to the University of Florida and schools in the Northeast, possibly the University of Massachusetts at Amherst or one of the other Ivy League universities. Depending on which university she attends, she plans to play club tennis and work her way onto the school’s tennis team.
She wants to double major in business and psychology.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
