North Meck 2-sport athlete is Charlotte’s Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year
Eliza Johnson came to her first tennis practice as a high school senior knowing little about the sport and holding a youth racket.
She had been getting ready for practice when one of her moms asked her if she had a racket. She went and checked the garage, grabbing the only one she found.
A few drills into practice, North Mecklenburg former tennis coach, David Casavecchia, came up to her and told her she was holding a kid’s racket.
Casavecchia’s wife later donated her racket to Johnson, but the moment showed how much learning the novice had to do. She had to learn very basics of the game — including grip.
“I didn’t know how long a match was, I was calling matches games,” she said. “I didn’t know how scoring worked.”
But by the end of the year, Johnson had drastically improved, helping another student with the rules and even making it to the conference tournament for doubles tennis.
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That ability to learn has helped Johnson in various walks of life, on the soccer field, in the classroom and in different cultures. She balanced soccer, tennis and school at North Mecklenburg, finishing with a 4.76 grade point average and earning a 1530 SAT to become the inaugural Charlotte Observer scholar-athlete of the year.
As a junior, with COVID still rampant and a difficult schedule in school, Johnson had to make the difficult decision to temporarily leave soccer. The main culprit was a computer science online course that occasionally took up eight hours of weekend days.
She finished the class, getting a “low A”, and returned to the soccer team as a senior, receiving a “Welcome Back” plaque from coach Mike Kutcher.
“It was just really exciting to have her there for the entire season,” he said. “She really was a girl that we could play in the back and the midfield, anywhere we needed to put her we knew what we were gonna get from Eliza.”
Some of the toughest soccer games Johnson ever played happened when she was an eighth-grader living in Costa Rica when she, her sister and her two mothers moved to Playa Potrero.
“We wanted to show the girls a different side of life. We lived in a very small town, 500 people who spoke only Spanish,” Johnson’s mother Linda Binder said. “We volunteered in the local school … for like three or four hours a day.”
Johnson would often play soccer barefoot in the town plaza — a decision that eventually led to a serious toe injury that left it temporarily unusable.
With her unable to play, she took that time to read, one of her favorite activities and one that she tried to take to almost immediately as an infant.
“There’s this really funny picture of me when I was like, one or less, in front of a newspaper looking completely engrossed and there were no pictures,” Johnson said.
She loved going to the library, finding a book and then immediately sitting down to read it. She enjoyed it so much that when she was in elementary school she wanted to have one of her birthday parties at the library.
“Mom was like, ‘Yeah you’re going to have to pick something else for a birthday party,’ ” Johnson said.
If she read at night and was told to go to bed, Johnson would fake slumber before the door closed — then she’d promptly flip the light back on and continue her story. One year, she asked Santa for a 1,000-page book (her parents gave her three 300-page books instead).
Johnson says she still reads around 30 books a year. Next year, she’ll attend UNC Chapel Hill and is considering studying information science.
At the end of tennis season, she tried to return the borrowed racket to Casavecchia — who declined and told her she should keep it.
“She wanted to pay me back for it and it was like no, you’ve done such a good job. There is no reason for you to do that,” Casavecchia said. “She was such a sweet young lady.”
The racket is now in Johnson’s car and is occasionally used for family games, a symbol of the mountainous learning curve she scaled.
This story was originally published June 22, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
