SEAL BEACH – Her back to the net, tennis coach Mickey Yelverton fed shot after shot toward the baseline and Slinky-armed, spring-legged Madison Bordelon.
Yelverton hit bullets, leaving the 11-year-old Madison never knowing which way she’d have to flex and pivot next to make her return.
“Stay balanced,” Yelverton instructed in an upbeat tone. “Be nice and relaxed. We should be able to adapt to what comes … not just what we think it’s going to be.”
Yelverton was talking about the action on this Seal Beach Tennis Center Court No. 13. But with Yelverton, it’s never just about tennis.
The best coaches teach more than sports. And Yelverton, 48, a U.S. Professional Tennis Association-certified coach for 17 years and U.S. Tennis Association-certified high performance coach for 12 years, is a great coach.
“Mickey is the secret treasure of a coach in Orange County tennis because she knows how to relate to every kind of player individually,” said Brenda Danielson, another tennis center instructor. “Just watch her.”
Yelverton teaches, challenges and tests. Most of all, she prepares her players for the only match that really counts: life.
Think about it: Few youngsters ever grow up to be pro tennis players, but everyone has a life.
Yelverton left the game too soon. Then she needed tennis – coaching it – to heal herself. A former prodigy, she reaches the shy, the stubborn and the scared players; she’s been all of them before.
Her story begins with a traumatic and nomadic childhood that forced her to abandon the game at 14 when she was abandoned by her father.
It would be 13 years of darkness, living without a home and nearly dying from an eating disorder before she returned to tennis and rebuilt her life.
“What I came from, and what I survived, make me the coach I am today,” said Yelverton, sitting in her office, the corkboard walls covered by photo and news clippings of her students.
She has guided hundreds of young talents through the junior ranks. Some have played nationals and received college scholarships. Four, she says, have gone to the ATP and WTA pro tours and one, Kean Feeder, has played the U.S. Open.
For the past 11 years, they’ve gone on and grown up while Yelverton has stayed here, wearing visor and sunglasses, roasting in the sun, and hitting balls.
Her forearms are tattooed with the Arabic and Japanese characters for wisdom, truth, tranquility and courage.
Each lesson she teaches, she helps and she heals from her own story, mostly untold until now.
A PLAYER
Collette “Mickey” Yelverton was born in Westminster and grew up in the northern part of the state, Susanville, where she rode horses, barrel raced and played catcher and second base as the only girl on a baseball team.
Her grandmother, Peggy Miller, played on the women’s tennis tour of the 1940s, an era of ruffled pants. A newspaper once heralded her as “The Beach Maiden.” She retired to a rural patch of property neighboring the Yelvertons.
Young “Cee Cee,” Mickey’s nickname at the time, used to watch tennis on TV with her grandmother. Miller was a tall, long-limbed, slender woman with thick, wavy hair, piano fingers and a tennis racket she wanted her granddaughter to hold.
“As soon as she put it in my hand,” Yelverton remembered, “it was part of me.”
There weren’t many courts near their home. So they made their own, drawing lines in the dirt; Yelverton on one side pretending to be Arthur Ashe, her older brother on the other as Jimmy Connors.
Her grandmother taught technique, giving the eager Yelverton drills, like hanging handkerchiefs in the corner of the court that she’d target for 10 winners in a row.
But life away from Grandma wasn’t simple. Yelverton says her parents turned their home into a battle zone with years of shouting and fighting. It was a chaos Yelverton spent years trying to escape.
She had to learn to live with the scars.
“I’d hear their voices, footsteps in the hall, a door slam, and I’d know what was next,” Yelverton recalled, closing her eyes. “If I could get away in time, I’d run to my grandmother’s. Sometimes it was too late.”
When she was 9 her family moved from California, and her grandmother. Her parents picked their new home by pointing randomly to a map – Kalispell, Mont.
Yelverton was already competing and winning at tennis, the court her sanctuary. Her father, she says, was proud to promote her sports career as she started to beat older teens and even some adults. She said their weekend road trips to national circuit invitationals became “our thing, with a lot of crowds, with scouts coming by, people cheering and saying, ‘Remember me when you get famous.’”
But even her achievements – a Utah state champ and, at 14, the nation’s top-ranked junior player – couldn’t solve the problems outside the white lines.
By that age she had lived in eight states, her fighting parents shuttling her between divided homes before they ultimately separated.
She says she attended 12 high schools before choosing to live with her father.
While driving from Arizona to take residence in Florida, they stopped roadside in Pensacola, Fla., in the middle of the night. She says he didn’t want to raise his daughter anymore.
He took her to a Greyhound station, handed her a ticket and her suitcase, and put her on a bus to Texas to live with relatives she barely knew. He drove off with his girlfriend in his Porsche.
“I was 14, and he left me there,” she recalled. “Tennis was done. I had nothing.
“And then I was completely … lost.”
Yelverton didn’t return to a court until she was 27.
During that gap, she says, she had moved back to Southern California to live with her mother. But she didn’t stay home, running away to sleep in parks and on friends’ sofas and “being lost on the streets,” she said.
She starved herself down to 80 pounds, the anorexia her attempt to control one small part of her existence. She was hospitalized and finished high school at Brea Neuropsychiatric Hospital.
“I wanted to shrink until I was nothing,” she said. “I wanted to disappear. I wanted to die. Everything was blank and numb.”
For nearly a decade, she says she wandered, still in pain.
Without a college degree, she took odd jobs in retail. And, somehow, she got by. Her survival eventually brought her strength.
By chance, a friend suggested playing tennis. They took the court at Wilson High in Long Beach one afternoon. Yelverton had to borrow a racket, which was lighter and bigger-headed than when she’d last played 13 years earlier.
It felt good.
“When I played tennis again, I chose to do it. I didn’t beat myself up when I missed a shot.”
Her life felt whole again.
“I asked myself, ‘Where had I been?’”
A COACH
She took her return seriously enough to climb to a No. 4 ranking in Southern California Women’s Open Singles. But Yelverton soon realized competition was still painful.
Thoughts of lost opportunities haunted her.
“It was just too late,” she said. “I had been away too long. But I transitioned into teaching when people came up to me and asked for tips.”
Yelverton learned she had a gift for reaching different personalities, knowing what to say to make the game both mentally and physically more manageable.
She became the assistant men’s tennis coach at Long Beach City College and the girls varsity tennis coach at Rosary High. She taught private lessons and, 11 years ago, began working as a teaching pro at Seal Beach Tennis Center.
She’d come full circle, teaching near her Westminster birthplace in the city where her grandfather had been a founding director of the Old Ranch Country Club.
“I am home now. I am whole, with tennis and in my life. I love the game again. I love my life again.”
Once a number, she’s highly sensitive to everything – including all that might be twisting inside her players.
She observes their parents too, especially the ones who yell. Sometimes, she looks at parents to explain technique and turns to soak the player in praise.
She protects her players from the destructive thoughts, the ones they tell themselves and the ones piled on them from beyond the court. She has had those thoughts.
By the end of a day, Yelverton’s communication leaves her voice raspy.
There’s always a lot to teach, always something to heal; some better way to survive.
Yelverton knows this because the lessons she shares are never really just about tennis.
Contact the writer: masmith@ocregister.com
