How many times in a row can you bounce a tennis ball off the side of a racquet frame? I tried it recently, and the answer, I am sad to report, was three. Logan West’s record is 1,229. West is a rising star in the esoteric world of freestyle tennis, which involves perfecting ludicrously difficult trick shots. If you’ve been to the US Open, Wimbledon, or the Australian Open lately, you might have seen him performing for crowds of onlookers. He also happens to be a serious tennis professional, overseeing the tennis program at Sidwell Friends for the past decade. The girls’ varsity team recently won its sixth straight championship, and the boys’ team took its own sixth championship last spring. This fall, West was named high-school coach of the year by the Racquet Sports Professionals Association. I caught up with him recently in his office in an athletic facility hidden underneath the football field, where he sipped chai and explained how he went from a law career to tennis coaching to minor online fame for his trick shots. West is himself a Sidwell grad, a former star player for the school’s tennis team. Growing up in Georgetown, he was introduced to the sport by his father, who worked for the World Bank, and fell in love with it, hitting balls in Georgetown’s Rose Park until his hands sprouted blisters. By the time he started at Sidwell in fifth grade, he was taking it more seriously, working with a coach. In high school, he played for Sidwell’s varsity team and on the USTA junior circuit. West next followed the path of many Sidwell grads, to the Ivy League (Dartmouth, where he was on the tennis team) and law school (GW, which he finished in 2010). Rather than work at a firm, he got a job as in-house counsel for a company that owned DC nightclubs. Then he and some partners ended up opening their own club, the Huxley, in Dupont Circle. LeBron James and Lil Jon partied there; Thrillist named it DC’s best club in 2013. West no longer spent much time thinking about his backhand. But the Huxley didn’t last, and West felt like he hadn’t really found his calling. One day, he heard from his old Sidwell tennis coach, Bill Budke. Would he ever want to come help with the team? That sounded kind of fun—get back on the court and get some exercise. He signed on as a part-time assistant coach, and it ended up having a bigger effect on him than he imagined. “You realize they’re soaking up everything you tell them and implementing it,” says West, who lives with his wife and two kids on Capitol Hill. “I enjoyed law, I enjoyed hospitality, but I hadn’t found that career where it all clicked.” West was named Sidwell’s head tennis coach in 2016; his teams have now won 12 conference championships and ten state championships. The freestyle thing started during the early days of the pandemic, when even outdoor courts were locked down. The Tennis Channel, starved for content, began airing videos that viewers sent in, and West made one of a trick serve he’d been working on, which involved bouncing the racquet off the ground. (You can see it on his Instagram, @wolverinewest.) The Tennis Channel featured the clip, and it went viral. (“This is super impressive,” said one Tennis Channel host when they showed it.) So West kept developing tricks and sharing videos, and now companies such as Babolat and Asics fly him around the world for demonstrations. “I certainly didn’t think when I graduated from Sidwell or Dartmouth or GW Law—or passed the bar and started to practice—that this was where I was going to end up,” he says. “But I couldn’t be happier. I’m in a place where I’m supposed to be.” This article appears in the December 2025 issue of Washingtonian.The post Sidwell’s Tennis Coach Does Wild Trick Shots first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less