About

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I'm Coach Geoff. First and foremost, I'm a dad, then a coach. You can catch me at my kids' tournaments on weekends, their team tennis matches, or having fun at the park with them.  Outside of tennis, Jea and I can get pretty competitive in arcade games. Giuliana and I are always looking to try new restaurants. And Jazelia always wants to do everything they do and more to top them. As a family, we love doing escape rooms and going anywhere we can all walk around. My wife, Janise, and I love watching movies together, as well as eating out at little privately owned restaurants. 

 As a tennis coach I've been training kids from ground-up since 2004. Most coaches are very impressed by talent, especially at an early age , correlating it with potential through hours and hours of training, basically doing the same drills every other coach is out there doing. I'm backwards. I see kids willing to work hard, willing to fall in love with the game and see where it takes them, and to me, that's all the potential they need. Some of my less naturally gifted players have gone on to become my best.

Originally founded by a very passionate and generous Auntie Bingh, looking to spend more time with her nephew, she combined the players of Craig Heinberg and I to form a junior tennis team to compete in the USTA Junior Team Tennis Ventura County League. To make sure we had enough players, she combined all of the kids, regardless of their ages to compete in the 14u division, and called them The Controllers. A name she thought was fitting. Of course, with our combined powers, they naturally won the Ventura County league, and went on to win the Sourthern California Junior Team Tennis Sectionals, 3 times within the first 2.5 years they competed. Bingh was so gracious, that even after her nephew aged out of junior team tennis, she continued the Controllers' winning legacy with our more newly developed players. And continued to win the 14u division, filling the rosters with kids as young as 7 and 8 years old, until she finally retired as the team captain, and I took over the team, myself. 

With our combined players, we typically had 2-3 teams per season in different age divisions, after I took the helm, in 2009. I changed the name of our team to The Control Beasts, and out of all of the seasons up until 2017, a year after Jazelia was born, I only remember not making it to Sectionals, maybe 2 seasons, total lol. After a brief break (having 3 kids back to back to back) we started back up again in 2019, just before the pandemic. Those 2 seasons we did not win, not even close to winning  a single match actually lol. The team was new, with players that just learned how to hold a racquet properly. We actually got crushed lol. It was tough for most of the kids to win just one game in a set. But 2 standouts from that team, were 12 year old Payton Costa and 11 year old Sofia Beckmann. Payton and Sofia traded places at the #4 singles line, and being out of the singles rotation, altogether. Neither winning a single match, they stuck with it, persevered, and Payton went on to become #1 singles at Simi Valley High School in her first year, and Sofia became their #2 when she got there, the following season. That same year as a Sophomore and Freshman, they went undefeated at #1 and #2 singles representing Ventura County at the USTA Junior Team Tennis So. California Sectionals in the Girls 18u division!