Renat Kramin '25 Recruiting Profile

Pursuing excellence in everything I do in life had become my life-long principle: from early childhood I learned a simple truth: “What is worth doing is worth doing well” and tried to apply it in any sport and study activities ever since.

Competitive sport is very important part of my life: I was invited to the competitive team for every sport that I was undertaking. My sport journey started with competitive Gymnastics at age of 5: its impact on my physical strength, balance, self-control and flexibility allowed me to master tennis early and fast, avoiding injuries and achieving great results. I started playing tennis competitively (participating in USTA and Little Mo tournaments) at age of 7. Simultaneously I started competing in swimming and won meets individually and for the team. Swimming gave me a lot of stamina, repetitive motion strength, and body-temperature control to survive long tennis matches under extreme weather conditions.

Competing in three sports (Gymnastics, Swimming and Tennis) became too hard when I turned 9 and started travelling to the various tournaments and meets. As a result, I had to quit competitive swimming. For the next three years I replaced it with a soccer (one of the best players of the team), basketball, mountain skiing (Expert only terrain) and taekwondo training (reaching the red belt level for a couple of months). These diverse experiences allowed me build various physical and mental skills that gave me further competitive advantage in both Gymnastics and tennis. However, once again, I had to choose between them (gymnastics and tennis) at the age of 11 when I stopped compete in gymnastics leaving it only as a supporting fitness activity. Since then, tennis was my main focus and I fully enjoyed my journey so far.

The mental strength gained from sport helped me to stay up under difficult circumstances: at Age 11 while skiing at French Alps I broke my thumb on the second day of my training. I finished training that day and continued skiing for the remaining days in the cast. Similarly, later that year, when I broke my foot in a semifinal of one of the tennis tournaments, I have finished the game when it happened and retired only when I could not wear my shoe from swelling any longer. These two events strongly affected my performance this year but built my character and allowed me to get back even stronger. Similarly, other challenges in my life build my strength, open new opportunities and allow to achieve higher results.

While my extensive sport activities created some challenges for academic activities (mostly time conflicts with the on-site full-time school), sport gave me all the tools to successfully overcome them: for example, ability to work hard under continuous pressure allowed me to select the hardest AP classes in the High school: AP JAVA Programming as a Sophomore, AP Chemistry as Junior Etc., and ability to focus for extended period of time despite of physical exhaustion and finish a given task helped in test preparation under tight time schedule.

Most sports I undertook involved participating in team tournaments. This allowed me to grow as a team player and build my leadership skills. I really enjoy being a part of the team, I fully commit to the team goals and try to maintain the team spirit high regardless of circumstances and challenges the team faces. All this helped a lot in both playing for the Varsity High school and in my Doubles division tennis tournaments. For example, our high team spirit and efficient coordination allowed us to win recently USTA L2 division (starting with no seed and winning most of high seed couples along the way).  

In school I enjoy technical subjects such as Programming, Physics, Mathematics, Engineering and Finance and I look for a college program where I can grow both as an athlete and as a scholar, and significantly contribute not only to the success of my tennis team but also to the academic program, in general. And I believe that my character and work ethic developed over years of extensive and diverse sport and rigorous academic training will allow me to achieve this goal.