Aloha everyone and welcome to my blog! I am super excited to show you more of what it is like to be a student-athlete at Hawaii Pacific University! My name is Jakub Beran and I am an international student-athlete from the Czech Republic. 4 years ago, I spontaneously decided to move to the US for college and got the opportunity to become a member of the tennis team here at HPU – become a SHARK! I am currently a senior and I have been a leader of the tennis team in the past 2 years. When I go back home for summer, I work as a tennis coach in my hometown where my tennis career started, and from where I got the best tennis memories.
My main focus here at HPU is business administration with a concentration in management. In the future, I would like to run my own business, probably related to tennis or other racquet sports such as padel or pickleball.
I was born and raised in a little village about 1-hour drive from the capital city of the Czech Republic, Prague. My family is a tennis family – my dad is a tennis coach who taught me how to play and he was my coach until I was 14 years old and had to move to Prague for bigger opportunities in terms of practice. My brothers also play tennis and have been pretty successful as well. So since I was born, everything and everyone led me to play tennis but I still played many other sports such as soccer and basketball. Later on, I had to decide what I wanted to focus on, and my number 1 was tennis, so I ended up playing college tennis here in real paradise!
I have had this opportunity to write for Kalamala where I would like to show you as much as I can from the life of an international student-athlete in Hawaii. We will be travelling to the mainland for our matches but we will also play some matches here and on the other islands. Hopefully, you will gain some information from my weekly posts and maybe it will also inspire and motivate you to come here to this beautiful island and feel the real vibe of Hawaii!
Let´s get it started!
