THE FUTURE FAMERS
Celebrating the next generation of icons
Angela Chen
It's appropriate that Angela Chen is going to be a Bulldog. After all, her grit has gotten her this far.
She started playing at eight, just for fun, with friends. But Angela isn't the kind to pick up something and put it down. Turns out, she was also a natural.
Troy Bray trained her hard. She lifted weights, sharpened her agility, and drilled her technique, especially her punishing crosscourt forehand. Angela started accumulating wins. Lots of them. She won the MSHSAA Singles State Championship in 2022 and led Ladue to the state title in 2022 and 2023. In 2024 she stepped away from high school tennis to focus more on her schoolwork. She came back in 2025 to win the Singles State Championship, lead the Rams to another state title, and earn Metro Player of the Year. A blue-chip prospect herself, she is 5-0 against other five-star opponents.
Of course her most satisfying win wasn't a final, or even a semi. It was a first-round victory in her first hardcourt tournament, the National Girls 14s. What made it so memorable wasn't that she won. It was the way she won. It took three sets, but she found a way against a girl who was older. It's not just what she does. It's what she doesn't do. Quit.
Angela is taking her talent and tenacity to Yale, where she'll play with other Bulldogs. Her Yale coach is already sold. Saphir-Kahan says, "Angela takes real ownership and accountability for her training — qualities that align perfectly with our team culture. She's also an excellent problem-solver, consistently finding ways to neutralize an opponent's strengths while maximizing her own."
She hopes to bring home an Ivy League championship and earn a trip to the NCAAs.
Gus Tettamble
Gus Tettamble is a unicorn.
He didn't throw himself into tennis. He squeezed it in between basketball and baseball and every other sport he played. That's what happens when you're a kid with a lot of energy. You try everything to burn it off. When he was in preschool, his dad would take him to Francis Park to hit against the handball wall. He got pretty good at it, good enough that his dad bragged to all his friends. It turns out one of those friends happened to be a college tennis player. So he started working with Gus.
That wasn't enough to keep him from bouncing off the walls. So when Gus wasn't serving aces he was sinking threes. Basketball and tennis is a rare combo for a player that good, but his coach, Rich Henschel, thinks it kept him fresh instead of burned out. For years, that balance meant taking whole winters off from tennis entirely, sometimes four or five months at a stretch. Then high school forced a choice, and tennis won. Winters meant driving out to Chesterfield just to find a court and summers meant practicing two or three times a day, sometimes up to five hours. By his senior year at SLUH, the Post-Dispatch called him arguably the best high school player to come out of St. Louis in over a decade.
Ask him about his favorite win and he won't give you just one. But ask him about a loss that stung and he'll tell you about the MSHSAA Class 3 singles final his junior year that he played while fighting through a torn wrist ligament. That near miss fueled him. He returned his senior year and capped off a 27-0 record with the state title.
He carried that fire to the University of Tulsa, where he served two years as team captain and chalked up 80 victories for the Hurricanes. He was a 2025 ITA Scholar-Athlete and two-time AAC Academic All-Conference. A redshirt year left him with one more season of eligibility even after graduating, and Gus has entered the transfer portal as a grad transfer.
His goals now are even bigger: play in all four Grand Slams, and one day give back to the St. Louis tennis community, especially the courts in the city that raised him.