Tech’s Kenny has returned to the nets after long break

An awkward yank on the back in a football game while he was in the seventh grade led Roswell’s Doug Kenny to spend months on his back, to go to 13 different doctors to properly diagnose his condition and then to become an elite golfer recruited by the Air Force Academy.

It led him to being told he should never play sports again, including his first love, tennis. And it finally led him back to tennis, and the No. 2 doubles position for Georgia Tech.

It is a safe bet that no one whom Kenny will play this week at the ACC championships, which begin today in Cary, N.C., spent almost six years away from the game and picked it up again less than a year before starting college.

“We just feel like God has a reason that he put him at Tech, that he’s playing tennis,” said Tracy Kenny, Doug’s mother. “Because it certainly isn’t normal.”

In May 2001, Kenny was a seventh-grader, a tennis star on the rise. He had been rated No. 3 in the nation in 12-and-under and first in Georgia.

Playing a schoolyard game of football, a friend pulled Kenny from behind with a strong tug. Kenny kept playing, but later learned he’d cracked the L5 vertebra in his lower back.

Rehab complications prolonged the healing. At times, after tearing disks in his back, he had to lay flat on his back for a month, getting up only to go to the bathroom, lest he aggravate his back and send shooting pain down his legs.

After re-tearing the disk, a therapist told the Kennys that he shouldn’t run again.

Said Kenny, “I just wanted to be active again so bad, but I couldn’t, and I was, like, what do you do?”

In 2004, after three years of recovery that set him back one academic year, his back completely healed. While he couldn’t run, a doctor cleared him to play golf if he would strengthen his core muscles.

By the next year, he was playing for Centennial High School and placing in elite junior golf tournaments. In 2006, he shot a 64 in a tournament at Pine Needles Golf Club in North Carolina, a regular host of the U.S. Women’s Open. Air Force, Army and Emory recruited him to play golf.

But tennis never left him. He said he felt a “longing” for the one-on-one competition of tennis that golf couldn’t provide.

In the fall of 2006, he took a physical on his back for his application for the service academies. His doctor, though, cleared him to run and, yes, play tennis, which he began to do in January 2007, almost six years after the injury.

At first, he just got reacquainted with the game, playing with his father, Rick, on his ALTA team. But his skills returned, and he decided to ditch the sure thing of college golf to take a chance on his dream, playing college tennis.

That was when his parents met Tech tennis coach Kenny Thorne at a fund-raiser. Initially not interested, Thorne began hearing that he should take a look.

Based on Kenny’s past record and a handful of matches and practices since he began playing tennis again, Thorne brought Kenny in as a walk-on. Since then, they have rebuilt his game, which basically had the technique and strategy of a 12-year-old player.

This season, paired mostly with Kevin King, Kenny has a 14-12 doubles record. Sunday, he helped Tech beat North Carolina 7-0, a win that might have secured the Jackets’ spot in the NCAA tournament.

NCAA tennis championships, today-Sunday, Cary, N.C.