Soccer
Favorite athlete: Jaime Carragher
Favorite team: Liverpool
Favorite sports memory: Playing high school soccer with my best friends.
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: Picture this: The ball is traveling towards me as I prepare to receive it out of the air, uncontested I might add. Then, out of nowhere, I wipe out. There is no one within a 10-foot radius of me. To this day, I still don’t know how I ended up on the ground. I was a freshman.
Music on iPod: I vibe to practically all kinds of music; however, my favorites come from that golden period about 10 years ago, right around when Brittney Spears shaved her head. Ah, the good ole days.
Future plans: I plan to continue my soccer career and major in education at TCNJ where I will study to become an English teacher.
Words to live by: “Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.”
One goal before turning 30: To own a jetpack backpack. If they haven’t invented those by the time I’m thirty, I’m going to have to send someone important a very angry e-mail.
One thing people don’t know about me: The only injury I’ve ever sustained was last winter when I strained my Achilles while walking to the fridge. All I wanted was a burrito.
She's just Jo.
It's a phrase that Pennsbury girls' soccer coach Kaitlyn Battiste often uses to describe Jo Tennant. The moments seem endless, the stories too numerous to just pick one in order to sum up the Falcons' co-captain.
"There's no one else who's really like her," Battiste said. "It's that personality meshed with that leadership."
A coach is lucky to get a once-in-a-career type of talent, someone who transcends any player they've had before. Tennant was never Pennsbury's best player, but the way she blends competitive fire with impassioned support for teammates, the rare ability to connect almost instantly with anyone she meets and a special, genuine sense of humor make Tennant her own type of generational player.
"She enjoys the game but she's the comic relief of the team," Battiste said. "She's not a class clown, she's smart in that it was always in the moments when we needed it the most, the moments where we were the most intense or the most frustrated and she has those little one-liners or honest moments that make you take a step back, breathe and laugh at yourself and be able to move on."
Aside from soccer, Tennant is a member of the National Honor Society, Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) and proudly volunteers with Athletes Helping Athletes.
Tennant's background and upbringing has a lot to do with who she is today. She carries a dual-citizenship and neither of them is from the United States. Her parents originally hail from South Africa, and she and her two brothers were born in England.
"All of my family, aunts, uncles, grandparents - they all live in South Africa and that's where my parents were both born and raised," Tennant said. "When they were married, they moved to England which is where they popped out three babies, me and my brothers, and when I was six, we moved over here (the United States).
"I have a green card, so I'm not here illegally, no worries."
Growing up in the town of Twickenham, just outside London, Tennant shared the family tradition of supporting Premier League side Liverpool. When she was six, her father's company presented the option to either move to Germany or the United States.
"I thought I was going to have to learn a new language," Tennant said. "I was really young and not that culturally versed so I had no idea what was coming."
Now, at least outside of her home, Tennant sounds like any other American teenager with no trace of an accent to reflect her origins. The senior said she just leaves it at the door when she goes out, but it comes back when she's with her family.
Even as a transplant, Tennant was able to connect with people very quickly upon moving to the United States. Nothing sparked it, it was just her personality.
"I'm just myself," Tennant said. "I'm pretty much an open book and whatever comes to me is what comes out. I think that my blended cultures helps me see different things in other people too."
Soccer is big in South Africa and king in England, so the sport was - as Tennant puts it - practically in the blood. At first, she got by on her natural athletic talents like speed and strength as she began to play competitively for Yardley Makefield Soccer (YMS).
Tennant is a linear thinker, in that once she sets her mind on a goal or decides on something, nothing will deviate her from that path. She was determined to become a better player, kept working at it and soon enough the technical play started to catch up to her physical abilities.
"My dad likes to say I was a late bloomer," Tennant said. "When I was younger, I was on the 'C' team, and about seventh grade, I really developed those skills and each year went up a team until I got to the team I'm on now."
Throughout her career, Tennant was exclusively a defender, moving up to Pennsbury's varsity during the team's 2014 run to a District I title and staying there the next two seasons. This season, with the Falcons hit by some preseason injuries, the coaches asked Tennant to move to outside midfielder.
Battiste said Tennant looks at the game very simply, and it was the way her co-captain responded to the challenge of playing a new position that was another of those "just Jo" moments.
"Where we got some of the best production out of her was when we asked to her to play a more attacking role," Battiste said. "We got a picture from her with a message saying 'Googling how to play outside midfielder.' The next game, she did everything we asked her to do."
Indeed, Tennant scoured Google and YouTube, finding a tutorial video on the position and absorbing anything she could about playing on the wing. The very next game, Pennsbury trailed Council Rock North, and early in the second half, new winger Tennant got down the flank and played in a wonderful service to senior Maddie Annan to spark an eventual 2-1 win.
"It was like coming out of my little habitat," Tennant said. "It was a whole new perspective, a whole new view of the field. As soon as they told me I would be on the wing, I was watching everyone I could, getting tips from everyone I could talk to who played wing. I Googled how to play wing, watched YouTube videos, anything to make me the best winger I could be."
Tennant was made a captain for a lot of reasons, and what most excited her about it was being able to share the role with Meredith Webber and Rachel Beri, two of her closest friends. One of the things the captains decided to do this year was have themed pasta parties the night before games. Tennant went all-in on her costumes, donning swimsuit, goggles cap and gold medals as Katie Ledecky for the Olympics theme. The senior said she usually threw things together in "about 20 minutes" beforehand, getting a late spark of inspiration after thinking it over all day.
While Tennant's minutes were the most in flux of the three, it didn't lessen her impact in leading the Falcons. If anything, it might have added to it.
"When I would look behind me, 99 percent of the time she's standing up on the bench or she's talking to someone else and not giggling or talking about anything else distracting; she's saying 'That's what I would have done' or 'Did you see how she just burned that girl?'," Battiste said. "She was very, very committed to the moment and what was happening. She was her teammates’ biggest cheerleader, but she would also take advantage of every opportunity she ever had."
Among those opportunities were plenty to deliver a well-timed line or impression to take all the tension out of the air. Tennant was as quick to make fun of herself as anyone else, but she also was able to measure the moment and be serious when required.
Nobody was safe, including her head coach.
"Battiste always loved to see my impressions of her on the side of the field," Tennant said. "During games when the refs would make bad calls, as they usually like to do, she would stand on the side, bend over and start screaming. She had these typical things she would resort to when she was mad at the refs and I loved showing her how that looked."
Just before the district playoffs, the Falcons were practicing. Having just earned the No. 2 seed coming off an SOL National title, they were feeling some of the pressure. Battiste felt like the players weren't giving the right focus and started to get on them until Tennant had another perfectly timed moment of stress relief.
"She did her impersonation of me," Battiste said. "She has my body language down and she starts going on about 'this is what you're going to say to the refs,' and 'this is what you'll say here' and in that tense moment and as much I was feeling the pressure - she reminded me we're here, we're listening and we're just having a good time."
The Battise impersonation was a good one, but it wasn't the only one Tennant has down to a T.
"Meredith Webber," Tennant said without hesitation. "Her laugh, you can hear it, they say, from approximately 2.6 miles away and it's just a comic relief for the team. Whenever you hear that laugh you know Meredith is coming, so I'd like to replicate it right after she would do it, just to keep it live."
She never thought to use it as a way to really startle her teammates by doing the laugh when Webber wasn't, as they say, within the 2.6 mile radius.
"That would have been a little freaky, I don't know, everyone would have thought she'd be coming then she wouldn't be there," Tennant said. "In hindsight, I guess I should have done that, that would have been cool. Normally I'd just do it with her and everyone would go 'Whoa, there's two of them! Where is it coming from?' But it was me."
This year, Tennant decided to try out for basketball and made the team. Despite never having played before and in her admission not having a "basketball mentality," the senior went through another round of Google and research so she could give her all on the hardwood.
Tennant said she's enjoying it so far, especially getting to play for coach Frank Sciolla, who is in his first year coaching the Falcons.
Pennsbury saw its soccer season end in heartbreak in a district playback game, leaving the Falcons short of the state tournament and bringing an abrupt and tough end to the seniors' careers. In the way she had so often delivered what the team needed, Tennant's reaction was right for the moment.
"She is someone who is really tough," Battiste said. "She makes everybody laugh, but she's a workhorse and a bulldog on the field. She's honest with herself and her team, and this was the first time - after we'd lost that playback game - that I saw her cry. She can be so funny and lighthearted, but it was appropriate that she was so upset and so torn. I’m not sure she even saw five minutes in that game, but it didn't matter.
"She was so gracious, not just of this season, but all four seasons of being able to play with her best friends and she was truly sad to see that end. We were all really upset to see we wouldn't have this time together again."
Tennant is not done playing soccer. She will continue her career at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) next year while pursuing her plan to become an English teacher. Both her choice of college and choice of career path are typical of Tennant in that she made up her mind on both early and wouldn't deviate from either.
In her time as a Pennsbury soccer player, Tennant took so much joy in not only bettering herself but also bettering her teammates and being a leader for them. She got to forge some unforgettable memories with her best friends and that, more than anything, is what she wants the next generations to do.
"What I really hope they continue is the intense team bond we had," Tennant said. "Without the collective team spirit, there's nothing to play for. That's the legacy I hope we left for them."
Battiste will coach more talented players, others who motivate and lead and others who have a knack for a funny moment. But she likely won't have any others like Tennant.
Why?
Because she's just Jo.
"Without fun, why play a sport or be part of a team? If everything is so serious, you're bound to break at some point," Tennant said. "You need to have fun, otherwise, what's the point?"
