By Brittany Rogers
Above image by Bradley Slade
A globe-trotting tennis star keeps connected to her faith through seminary.
The screen looks like the Brady Bunch intro, only the grid is full of teenagers. Even though the backgrounds behind each face are nondescript, the students all want to know one thing: Where is Jane?
“It’s an inside joke,” says their former seminary teacher, Nick Thurgood. For six weeks, Jane Dunyon was in Egypt. For a year, France, with jaunts to Sweden, Scotland, and Austria sprinkled in. Lately, it’s been Canada and all over the continental United States. The aspiring tennis pro travels like Carmen Sandiego, with pit stops at tournaments and tennis academies.
No matter where Dunyon is, seminary meets her there online. At times, she says, it’s been a lifeline.
“There’ve been times when I’ve really relied on seminary,” she says, like when she lived alone abroad and Sunday services were exclusively in French. “It was so hard to pay attention,” she says. “I still went, but seminary, like, became my church. It was that important to me.”
And she has a rep for bringing friends into the video feed.
“She brings more students with her to seminary than anyone we’ve ever met,” says Thurgood, now a marketing manager for Seminaries and Institutes of Religion.
Dunyon’s take: there’s less pressure when it’s online. “Sometimes it’s just easier to talk or to bring someone when we’re over a camera and not in person,” she says.
It’s the kind of feedback the Church has been listening to.
The Church is adapting both online and in-person seminary to teach the gospel in new ways to reach the rising generation, says Thurgood. And as Dunyon’s experience demonstrates, the youth are responding.
California Dreamin’
Born and raised in Utah, Dunyon had a tennis racket in hand by age 5. She and her oldest sister, Jacque, “just really connected with tennis early on,” she says.
With no background in the sport, their father, Dave Dunyon, dove in headlong, accompanying the girls to Florida for training and grinding through hours of sets with them on the court. Then Jacque committed to the BYU Cougars tennis team, and Jane lost her built-in training companion.
Jane’s proposal to fill the void? A tennis academy in California.
“Jane was so sold on the idea,” says her mother, Jen Dunyon. A family move wasn’t feasible, and housing through the academy was costly. Undeterred, then-14-year-old Jane searched online for the nearest Latter-day Saint chapel and contacted the bishop.
“Obviously it was a bit awkward,” she says of making the call. Was there a family who wanted to take in a teen tennis talent?
In fact, there were two.
Dunyon first lived with the Menloves, who say Dunyon is the kind of teen who dispels all misgivings about teenagers. “She was so mature,” says Jessica Menlove, raving about Dunyon’s energy and positivity. “Jane brought much joy to our home. Our kids immediately loved her.”
When the Menloves moved to Utah, Dunyon moved in with the Wynns, who had a daughter Dunyon’s age. They’re now basically siblings, says Dunyon.
Sister Janine Wynn also taught early-morning seminary. And so freshman Dunyon’s seminary career began. “How could you not [go] when you’re living with the seminary teacher?” laughs Dunyon.
“During the week it was brutal,” she says of waking up at 5:30 a.m. to get to seminary; then heading straight to tennis lessons, weight training, and matches; and then hitting the books around 4 p.m.
Her mother worked as a travel agent, allowing her parents to fold visits into work trips. And Jane made frequent trips home to Huntsville, Utah, too, picking up a 6A high school state tennis title—as a freshman. It marked four straight titles won by a Dunyon: Jacque was the 6A champ from 2018 to 2020, Jane in 2021.
Topping her home state in tennis, and with a year at the California academy under her belt, Dunyon turned her sights international.
Serving in France
The Mouratoglou Tennis Academy, founded by the longtime coach of Serena Williams, was a tougher sell.
Dave accompanied Jane to a tryout of sorts at the famed school, located on the French Riviera. Jane, a lefty with “a big forehand,” churned through her opponents. “By the end, I was hitting with some of their top players,” says Jane. The school offered her a spot on its traveling junior pro team.
The family returned home to chew on the idea of the 15-year-old living 6,000 miles away. “A lot of thought went into that, and a lot of prayer,” says Dave. “A lot of things in life are more important than tennis.”
“It was a huge sacrifice,” says Jen. “Jane is a huge part of our family.”
They sent her off the same way they did for California: with a priesthood blessing. And again, ward members came in clutch. Through friends, the Dunyons connected with a stake presidency counselor in nearby Nice, France, whose wife was the Young Women president. “We knew she had people to look after her,” says Jen.
For Dunyon, it was a dream. “Imagine living with all your best friends, playing tennis all the time, being around people who have the same goals and mindset,” she says. Figuring out how to navigate city streets and café menus was the hardest part, she says. “Once I got settled in, gosh, it was perfect.”
On Sundays in France, ward members drove 45 minutes out of their way to pick Dunyon up for church. They wrote out the Young Women lessons in English for her to follow along. After church, she attended “linger longer” meals and tagged along on member visit after member visit. “Church out there is like an all-day event,” says Dunyon. And then they’d drive her home around 5 p.m.
That is, until Dunyon’s entourage got too big.
Her tennis-academy peers, curious why Dunyon dressed up at 7:30 a.m. on their only day off, started joining her. “I just asked every single week,” says Dunyon. “When my friends started to get homesick, they wanted to be around me, and we just became a big family going to church together.” The group took an Uber.
One of these friends, says Dunyon, was a Muslim teammate. In a moment of connection, they shared prayers with each other out loud. “She loved that we spoke from our hearts,” says Dunyon. “By the end [of that year in France], she was coming with me [to church] every week. I had so many people coming with me. They got to feel the spirit of going to church and stuff. It was a really cool missionary experience for me.”
She had her seminary class cheering her on behind the scenes. “Having online seminary there really gave me the push to invite, to encourage people to come with me,” says Dunyon, who invited friends to seminary too. In her dorm room, “I would put seminary on full volume,” she says. Her roommates—and whoever else happened to walk in—made cameos, sometimes joining for the whole lesson.
Fast forward to today, and one of those academy friends recently visited Dunyon back in Utah and joined her for seminary there too. “I gave her a Book of Mormon after,” says Dunyon. “It was pretty cool.”
A Perfect Match
The Dunyons couldn’t be more grateful for the online seminary options.
When it came time to sign Jane up, Jen was surprised to find eight different online seminary classes from which Jane could choose that worked with the teen’s intense schedule. “The Church is so important to us. We did not want Jane to enter these critical teenage years without [seminary].”
Dunyon happily deleted that 5:30 a.m. seminary alarm. Her online class met just once a week, Fridays at 4 p.m. France time.
“I so looked forward to it,” she says. “I know it sounds super cheesy, but it’s true.” She’s heard teens who attend in-person seminary talk like seminary is just another class. Dunyon can’t relate. Her once-a-week class may have been more potent, she says, because of the anticipation and preparation students brought to class. “I wanted to be ready, to have something to say,” she says.
“It’s so much better, and real, when the students are sharing,” says Thurgood. “That’s everything.”
Throughout the week there are daily lessons for the students to digest, part of the online seminary model the Church has offered now for a decade. Thurgood says online seminary was once reserved for students like Dunyon, whose schedules conflicted with in-person offerings. Now, he says, online seminary is open to all—part of a movement to make seminary and institute more accessible.
“We’re getting more popular,” Thurgood says of Seminary and Institutes; enrollment has grown even against a demographic decline in teens and young adults on the Church rolls. In the last three years, the Seminary and Institutes rolls have grown by 125,000 students, 45,000 of those in seminary. “We’re learning how to speak to our audience better.”
Take the podcasts Thurgood put together for his classes. The idea: “To give them a seminary experience in their own language on their own terms,” he says. “It’s another way to have a daily touchpoint with seminary,” he says, adding that “online seminary teachers have freedom to try and create unique experiences for their students, to go beyond core reading and writing.”
His podcast featured a new guest each week, and in one episode, he put Dunyon on the mic.
“Our first-ever seminary student coming live from Egypt,” Thurgood began. As a member of the French academy’s junior pro traveling team, Jane played in Egypt and beyond. Egyptian music blared in the background as Dunyon, from an outdoor courtyard, fielded questions about her experiences all over the world.
“Her testimony is so bright and organic and contagious, people were happy to listen,” says Thurgood.
“I can tell a difference with seminary in my life,” says Dunyon. “At home I leaned on my parents’ testimonies. In France, I feel like I developed a testimony for myself.”
Being Big
Jane wanted another year in France, but the family decided against it. “We didn’t want to lose all of her adolescent years,” says Jen. The 18-year-old is now back home in Utah for at least part of each week.
Jane now plays on the professional circuit, traveling with her dad, Dave, who is also her coach, weekly.
“She’s doing awesome,” says Dave. “Her ranking is pushing forward. It’s just a long and grinding process.”
Simultaneously the five-star tennis recruit is wrapping up high school and seminary online and has already committed to play for the University of South Carolina Gamecocks, a perennial top-20 tennis program.
“Jane had her choice of many, many schools,” says Dave—and she strongly considered playing for BYU with Jacque, who is now a senior for the Cougars. But Jane felt a connection to the coaches at South Carolina. She also weighed the insight given to her by a Church area authority who lives in her home ward. “Jane, be a missionary,” Elder Aaron T. Hall told her. “You’ve been preparing for this moment; you’ve always been in situations where you’ve invited others to share in your beliefs.”
Because they’re apart so much, the Dunyons have a mantra of sorts, says Jen, that applies in their home and beyond. “We always tell Jane, ‘When you’re home, be big. When you’re in class, be big. Make sure you’re answering questions. Make sure you’re reaching out to those around you. Make sure your presence is felt.’”
It’s exactly what she wants for her daughter at the University of South Carolina, where the institute building happens to be next door to Dunyon’s campus housing.
“In seminary this past year, what’s really stuck with me is that Heavenly Father has my best interest at heart,” says Dunyon. “I’m realizing what the Spirit feels like. . . . I’ve figured out what I believe and why I believe it.”
She is ready to go to South Carolina, she says, and be big.
