When Brent Grice was six years old, his dad, Barry, handed him a wooden tennis racket and toted him to Belmont Abbey where a friend, head tennis pro Mike Reidy, introduced the child to the game. It was better that way, Barry thought, to have someone else teach basics; then he’d slip in later and fine-tune it. “He was busy with work, so he sent my sister Alissa and I to learn how to play. He wanted us to learn, and he wanted someone else to teach us,” Brent Grice says. “So we’d go every summer. I still have that racket. Dad played in tournaments every weekend, and we would travel all around North Carolina to watch him play. He would hit with us between matches, on the empty courts.

That’s all I did when I was a kid. Until I played other sports.” Tennis became the groundwork, a foundation for what Brent Grice, 55, would accomplish. Grice joined a Little League baseball team when he was eight. He was bigger than most, when he played for First Presbyterian Church in Mount Holly, but not in an awkward way, though the League did require he bring a birth certificate to All-Star games. Grice played first base and pitched in middle school, then added third base, and basketball, in high school. “Playing tennis at a younger age helps your hand-eye coordination,” he says. “I was 6-foot, 205 pounds at age 12. I was bigger than the principal at my elementary school. Tennis made baseball a lot easier. I think I actually fell in love with baseball the night when I was a kid and the 1977 World Series was on, and Reggie Jackson hit three home runs in a game. That’s the first memory I have of really liking to watch baseball.” Baseball and tennis have been good to Grice.

He signed a baseball scholarship to Belmont Abbey College, where he was a four-year starter, three-time MVP, two-time All-Conference player and team captain three years. Prior to college, he was a three-time youth tennis champion, playing for the Southampton Racquet and Swim Club in Gastonia. “I played baseball and basketball for the middle school, but the whole time I was also playing tennis,” he says, “because of my dad.” This year, his multiple accomplishments have landed him in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame. A familiar place, for the family. In 2016, Grice’s father was inducted for his success in tennis. Barry passed away in June 2022. “It’s an honor,” Brent Grice says. “My dad and I were really close. He saw something in me when I was growing up, that I was athletic enough to do things, and I thank him for leading me in the right direction and helping me along the way.”

Though Grice didn’t play tennis in high school (it conflicted with baseball), he did visit courts at night, on his free time, because the game still had a grip, and he couldn’t let it go. One of those evenings, in 1988, he met a girl named Lisa – and a new season began. But back on the fields at East Gaston, there were games to play, titles to win. He was MVP and All-Conference. “We had a really good baseball team, and we had a great coach in Darrell Van Dyke,” Grice says. “Just the whole experience, the whole three years, we were all friends and it was fun to be a part of that. From the time I was a sophomore, everyone on the team made you feel important.” He remembers the Gaston County Easter Tournament in 1988: “We played three unbelievable games and won it in the last inning,” he says. He played forward for the basketball team and was AllConference as a senior, Class of 1989. “Back then, East Gaston was such a big school, and we played all the Charlotte schools,” he says. “It was different playing them, because we were playing all the guys who were getting scholarships to the ACC. We were just a bunch of country boys playing the good basketball players from Charlotte, and we did very well, actually.” His junior year, East Gaston played Ashbrook. “It’s my favorite memory,” he says. “We had one of the best players in the state on our team, and he was a senior and I was a junior, and somehow they passed me the ball and I threw it in and we won in overtime.” Colleges noticed Grice.

Rutgers University talked with him about baseball. He was accepted at UNC Chapel Hill – but not for sports – and was ready to go. He chose a dorm room and roommates. He was eager to wear Carolina blue. Except for one technical difficulty. He wasn’t asked to play baseball at Carolina. But the girl he met on the tennis courts, Lisa, had committed to Chapel Hill. “I decided baseball was not over,” he says. “It was a really big decision.” He ended up with both. Grice majored in business at Belmont Abbey while excelling on the baseball field. “A personal memory was hitting a home run off of the Wheeler Center my freshman year in college,” he says. “It was a topic of conversation with my teammates that no one could do it, and it happened against Pfieffer. It was a long way. My teammates were very excited for me, and that made it kinda memorable.” (The Wheeler Center, built in 1969, is Belmont Abbey’s athletic center, with facilities for basketball, volleyball, cheerleading and wrestling, and 24 athletic department offices. It was named for Humpy Wheeler, Sr., who was athletic director for 28 years). Grice graduated and became a sales manager for a food company in Charlotte.

He and Lisa married and have two children, Ryan, 25, and Allie, 21. Ryan played basketball in high school; Allie played basketball and tennis. Those tennis courts at Belmont Abbey, where Grice first used that old wooden racket, are now the Reidy Tennis Center, named for Barry Grice’s friend and long-time Abbey coach and administrator. If those courts could speak… “When I got older, my dad would come home from work and we’d play tennis,” Grice says. “I never beat him. He was too good, even as I got older and stronger. It was a good bonding. He taught me how to treat my son and daughter. Go out and rebound with them, or do something different. Take time. Do the small things.”