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Jerusalem Thao \u201920 came to MPA as a tenth grader and made an immediate impact. As a Panther, he excelled in both soccer, and his primary sport, tennis. He was captain of the soccer team, IMAC all conference, and a recipient of the coaches\u2019 award.<\/p>\n
In tennis, Thao served as captain, helping bring a state team championship home at the 2019 Boys’ state tennis tournament. He paired up with Dillon Vue \u201920 to compete in the 2019 State Doubles tournament. In their path to the consolation championship, David Gorman and Zachary Piehl from Breck defeated Dillon and Jerusalem, followed by the MPA pair\u2019s wins over Worthington High School\u2019s Kipton Jenson and Cade Lindner, Hibbing High School\u2019s Carter Anderson and Ryan Osborne, and Virginia High School\u2019s Ryan Scherf and Jace Westerbur to secure the Consolation Championship for Mounds Park Academy. Thao was also heavily involved in St. Paul Urban Tennis.<\/p>\n
Thao chose to compete collegiately at St. Olaf in Northfield, MN, where he is majoring in Psychology. \u201cMy cousin previously attended St. Olaf, and it really caught my eye. I also liked the fact that it\u2019s a small school where there are smaller class sizes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Thao also credits his time at MPA for helping him make inroads in college. \u201cI think what has best prepared me for college was the social aspect of MPA. As a transfer student, it can be difficult to fit into a new community. And I learned how to navigate and converse with people who I wouldn\u2019t normally have a connection with.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though the COVID-19 pandemic hampered Thao\u2019s first year of collegiate tennis, he looks forward to competing in the future!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jerusalem Thao \u201920 came to MPA as a tenth grader and made an immediate impact. As a Panther, he excelled in both soccer, and his primary sport, tennis. He was captain of the soccer team, IMAC all conference, and a recipient of the coaches\u2019 award. In tennis, Thao served as captain, helping bring a state […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":20012,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10031],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mpacollegeathletes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20014,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20011\/revisions\/20014"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}