MARYVILLE, Mo. — Northwest Missouri State athletics occasionally boasts about the “Bearcat family.”

In the case of Northwest’s tennis program, “family” is more literal than figurative.

Family names like Lipira, Pendrak and Lindsay have dotted Northwest tennis rosters for the past decade.

Jordan Lipira pounds out the groundstrokes these days at No. 2 singles for the Bearcats, but she wasn’t the first Lipira to play for longtime coach Mark Rosewell. Her sister, Sarah, was a Bearcat player from 2000 to 2004, then worked as a student coach, leaving the year that Jordan arrived on campus.

Gina and Emily Lindsay had successful careers at Northwest before, even seeing the influx of another tennis-playing family — the Pendrak sisters of Nevada, Mo. Jan was the first to arrive on campus, then in the 2006-07 school year, Gina Pendrak and Lisa arrived as a junior and freshman, respectively. Lisa currently plays No. 3 singles and No. 1 doubles, while Gina Pendrak moved from player to assistant coach, much like Sarah Lipira did several years earlier.

But the family ties extend much further than that. They began with Rosewell’s first Northwest team in 1985.

That’s when George Adeyeme was a nationally ranked No. 1 singles player for the Bearcats.

“George was a top-50 player; he was outstanding,” Rosewell said.

George also became a father, and 27 years after he dominated opponents on the court, his son, Tony Adeyeme, is getting in his shots as a junior playing No. 3 doubles.

Like the sibling Bearcats, son Tony already had some familiarity with the Bearcat tennis program. He grew up in Maryville, attending Horace Mann School on campus before moving to Indiana with his father in sixth grade. But Tony attended Northwest camps and hung around the tennis courts as his father gave lessons and coaches, as he still does today.

Eventually, the tennis bug took hold.

“I was always around him,” Tony said. “I’d spend my summer days, messing around the tennis court. I wanted to play football when I was little, but around junior high I started getting serious with tennis.”

His father is in the background now, though George returned to campus last fall for the Hall of Fame banquet that honors the top Northwest student-athletes of the past. But now it’s Tony’s time to shine.

It’s the same with Lisa Pendrak, who made the decision with the middle Pendrak sister, Gina, to come to Northwest after Gina’s stint at a junior college.

And both knew from older sister Jan that this was where they wanted to be, in spite of their parents’ wishes.

“We live down by Pittsburg, Kan.,” Lisa explained. “That’s where our coach, Jack Johnson, lives. (Pittsburg State) didn’t have a tennis team — that’s where my parents went — so it was kind of a school rivalry thing; they didn’t want us to come to Northwest.”

But the younger sisters knew from their older sister, who came here in 2000, what the tennis program and the coach were like, and decided they wanted to be a part of it.

“We knew Northwest was the fit for us because Jan played here,” Gina said. “She had such a good experience here, and we were pretty much a part of the Northwest family before we ever got here.”

The experience was much the same for Jordan Lipira, who got to know Rosewell through her older sister.

“I knew the coach already, so it wasn’t like he had to do much recruiting,” Jordan said. “We had already talked, and I already knew that in this program we worked hard. And I knew this was where we wanted to go.”

In fact, Rosewell said that in some instances he didn’t even know there was a tennis-playing younger sibling in the family when he recruited the first one. But when the first sibling had a good experience, the others just seemed to follow.

Sibling rivalries among the Bearcats have been few, even when one sibling has graduated to the role of coach. Gina Pendrak said it might even be easier for her to coach Lisa because she knows her so well.

“I know when not to talk to her,” Gina said. “I know that sometimes she just needs to get herself out of it, and there’s nothing anybody else can do. I can read her probably better than a lot of other people.”

Lisa agrees ... to a point.

“It’s good, and it’s bad because we know which buttons to push with each other,” Lisa said. “She and my older sister have coached me since I was just starting, so it’s nothing new. But there’s the occasional sibling fights,” she admitted with a nervous laugh. “It happens.”

Sports reporter Rick Dunaway can be reached at rickd@npgco.com