Courtesy of Brian Beard

With a nickname like “Zeus,” it’s no surprise that Mark Kneiss ’26 has been a dominant force for the men’s tennis team (13–3; 7–1 NESCAC) in his senior season. Starting in the fall, Kneiss won the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) New England Singles Championships, earning a spot in the national ITA Cup, where he was a quarterfinalist, and he is currently ranked fourth in the country for singles.

Kneiss grew up in Athens, Greece and started playing tennis when he was eight years old, developing his game through years of hard work and time on the court.

“I ended up loving it, ended up wanting to spend more time on the court, wanting to play more ball,” Kneiss said. “[I] slowly started taking it a little more seriously, had some good results, wanted to stick with it and saw that it could help me potentially get into college.”

Since his father hails from the United States, Kneiss was recruited more heavily than a typical international player would be, eventually landing at Bowdoin. In his first two seasons in Brunswick, Kneiss played an important role in the team’s success, playing in the middle of the ladder on a star-studded Polar Bear roster. In his first year, the team lost 4–5 to Middlebury College in the NESCAC championship match and again in the quarterfinals of the NCAA tournament. In his sophomore year, the team took home the NESCAC title and advanced to the semifinals of NCAAs.

“I was super fortunate to get to play with a bunch of guys who were super talented players [and] really invested in the program. I got to practice with some guys that were two of the best players in the country … [first-year] fall, two guys on our team were ranked within the top five in the country,” Kneiss said. “That was a super exciting opportunity that I got to see exactly what they do, exactly what they’re saying to themselves and definitely a lot of the stuff they were doing rubbed off on me.”

Going into his junior year, Kneiss was the top player on the team, playing at the top of the singles ladder on a team that made the NESCAC championships. Kneiss said he didn’t need to make any big changes given his new role.

“It’s all just small, marginal improvements. It’s easy to see number four to number one and feel like that’s a big shift, but really, we’re all doing a lot of the right stuff, and it’s just executing at a little bit of a higher level, a little more consistent pace,” Kneiss said.

It’s clear that Kneiss has embraced the pressure with responsibility, as he can count his singles losses this spring season on one hand. The same can be said for his doubles matches, where he and partner Jackson Codd ’27 have given the Polar Bears plenty of strong starts with their on-court chemistry.

This weekend marks the team’s last two regular season matches, traveling to face Williams College (9–4; 6–2 NESCAC) tomorrow at noon and Middlebury College (12–3; 6–2 NESCAC) Sunday at noon.

“Middlebury and Williams are going to be really strong teams, and that’s exciting because there’s not a lot of other teams that get this opportunity to be as battle tested as we are going to the postseason,” Kneiss said. “We’ve done things a little differently the past three weeks, trying to increase our competitiveness, trying to work on really visualizing what we’re doing in that pressure situation to prepare ourselves for matches just like these.”

Currently the second-ranked team in the conference and tenth in the nation, the Polar Bears are on pace to have a long postseason, with the NESCAC tournament next weekend and the NCAA tournament on the horizon. Kneiss is fully confident that the team can win any match on any day.

“I think this team is capable of beating anybody out there. We saw that when we played Claremont [Mudd-Scripps Colleges], who was the number one in the country at that time, and we put ourselves really in a winning situation. It’s experiences like that that give me even more confidence that you’re going to be ready next time you see a team.”