Tennis and fishing have little in common except that a net can stand between success and failure.

But 10-year-old East Brainerd tennis player Sarah Faith Ingell and young anglers such as 12-year-old Dakota Cantrell and Hank Lowrie have been recognized for success at an early age, and national organizations are helping them get better at what they do.

Ingell, who the last two weekends won the 10s division of the GPS Winter Open and the 12s consolation bracket at Baylor, went Feb. 21-22 to the United States Tennis Association’s Southern 10 & Under Junior Camp in Louisville, Ky. She was one of four girls invited from Tennessee as part of the USTA’s “high performance” program to maximize development of promising young players.

And while the weekend was grueling for the players, according to Scott Ingell, Sarah Faith’s father, it had a simultaneous objective of keeping tennis fun so they won’t burn out.

“There were 16 kids total,” Scott Ingell said, “and they did a lot of different drills and endurance things. They ran them pretty hard; there also was a lot of agility training. My daughter was so tired that she almost couldn’t get out of the car when we got home.

“At the same time, there were seminars for the parents, basically designed to make sure we keep it fun and don’t sabotage these kids’ potential. The parents were reminded that it’s about the kids, not them.”

Sarah Faith, a fourth-grader at the Chattanooga School for Liberal Arts, has worked with Murtala Habu at the Hamilton YMCA since she was 4 years old and also has been helped by GPS coach Sue Bartlett and Keith Dressler, according to her father.

She was chosen for the Southern 10s junior camp from “an overall assessment of (her) performance in competition, talent, sportsmanship and willingness to improve as determined by the USTA Tennessee Junior Competition Committee,” according to the invitation letter from Sandy Hastings, the USTA’s director of junior competition.

“Sarah Faith really enjoys the game,” Habu said. “She always wants to go an hour and a half (in a training session). From my coaching experience, most that age hardly make it to 45 minutes.

“She has a lot of talent, and she has worked hard on technique. She’s also very consistent and patient. It doesn’t matter to her how long it takes to play a point. And she can think very efficiently about how to make points.”

The National Bass Fishing Trail is not the only tournament fishing tour that incorporates juniors, but it may do it the best. It has districts from Alabama to Wisconsin, and youth competitors are treated basically like adults.

Donnie Story is a seventh-grade social studies teacher at East Limestone Middle/High School in Athens, Ala. He also heads the NBT’s Alabama North District and is its national junior director.

“I’ve been fishing since was about 5 years old, when my daddy and granddaddy took me down to the pond,” Story said recently. “Being a teacher, I love kids, but another aspect of this for me is that when I was 17 or 18 there was an adult friend that kind of took me under his wing and got me hooked on bass fishing and tournament fishing.

“When I take kids out in my boat, it’s kind of my way of paying him back.”

He said the NBT is different from other tours in that juniors spend the whole day on the lake for tournaments just as the adults do, and “they get the full experience of tournament fishing.”

Cantrell, a seventh-grader at Monteagle Elementary, was the junior angler of the year for the Tennessee District headed by David Lowrie, whose son Hank earned that honor in 2007. Cantrell led all juniors in the NBT in points in 2008, while his dad, Gene, was second among the adults.

“What made me want to get into it was was watching the tournaments on TV and seeing you could make a living at it. You can make good money,” said Hank Lowrie, a sixth-grader at Swiss Memorial in Gruetli-Laager.

“He’s been fishing with me since he was in diapers,” Gene Cantrell said of Dakota, “but this tour goes extra with the juniors.”

Dakota said he has taken to tournament fishing because “it’s more exciting,” but he has to work on his net skills.

When his dad caught a 5.53-pound bass, “I went to scoop it in the net, and it jumped over the net. Then I went to scoop it again, and it bounced off the net.” He then grabbed it with his hands, “or I probably would’ve had to hitchhike home.”