It took about an hour for the final rounds of the NCAA Division I men’s tennis championships to get real.
The best doubles teams from Virginia and Kentucky fought an epic tiebreaker to decide who would take the often decisive colon for their match’s singles. The Cavaliers and Wildcats took turns saving match points with whopping volleys and bold passing shots while their teammates and fans howled and jeered at every winner and mistake.
A final forehand from Virginia sailed far and wide, giving Kentucky the tiebreak, 11-9, and the early advantage in the team event. The howling grew louder and the taunts louder. The All England Club wasn’t.
In the collegiate version of this supposedly posh sport—particularly in the latter leg of the NCAA championships—tennis morphs into something more akin to the spectacle of pro wrestling.
The players roar after almost every point. Coaches regularly stroll the pitches mid-game for short, encouraging chats and strategy tips. The crowd cheers at double faults and misses, and fans clamor for action on one pitch when someone wants to serve on another pitch just yards away. The school colors stand out against the pitches – Texas Christian Purple, Texas Longhorn Burnt Orange, North Carolina Baby Blue, Stanford Cardinal – and provide a welcome change from the corporate attire seen throughout pro play.
It’s tennis with the volume cranked up to 11, something the often staid and stale pro tours could learn from.
“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” said Fiona Crawley, a junior at the University of North Carolina who is the highest-ranked woman in the country and plays for the top-ranked team. “That is my life.”
Crawley from San Antonio studies English and Comparative Literature. Her plan after graduation is to “butt her on tour for two years because I love to travel,” and then become a teacher.
The top-ranked men’s team from the University of Texas also has the best player on its side: Junior Eliot Spizzirri leading the top-ranked Longhorns into the round of the last eight. He’s thrilled that he’s not yet on the back roads of the professional race track.
“It almost feels like a different sport,” Spizzirri said of collegiate tennis. “You’re looking left and right and your best friends are competing right next to you and you don’t want to let them down.”
An ocean away from all of that, Madrid, Rome and Paris will serve as hotspots in pro play during this month’s European clay-court swing. But for pure, high-octane intensity from first ball to last, what’s happening here on the steamy courts of the USTA National Campus is hard to beat.
This year, the USTA is hosting the finals of 14 major collegiate championship competitions in Divisions I, II, and III. It is part of a USTA proposal to the NCAA to make the Orlando training center the permanent home of the finals of Division I tournaments, which means teams will have quarterfinals off-team and separate singles and doubles events.
The idea is to compare traveling to Orlando for tennis with traveling to Omaha for the men’s College World Series, an annual goal for Division I baseball teams since 1950.
“This is an opportunity to up the college game,” said Lew Sherr, USTA executive director
One argument for the sprawling campus is its spectator seating, which breaks the backbone of the pitches and makes it easier to watch simultaneous games that impact each other.
But one hurdle could be the weather. Playing tennis in Orlando in May can sometimes feel like playing on the surface of the sun and games have been suspended due to rain. A thunderstorm on Thursday meant Division I play was suspended for the night and there is not enough indoor seating to offer a backup plan.
Regardless of the venue, however, collegiate tennis has recently made a name for itself in the sport, proving to be a viable option for young up-and-coming talent.
Cameron Norrie, who played Christian for Texas, is ranked 13th in the world. Last year’s NCAA champion Ben Shelton delighted at the Australian Open. Jennifer Brady (UCLA) and Danielle Collins (Virginia) have both reached the Australian Open singles final in recent years.
The ATP Top 100 includes a dozen former collegiate players, and the men’s tour has even teamed up with collegiate tennis to guarantee the top-ranked collegiate players spots in lower-tier pro tournaments.
This season, North Carolina State hosted Diana Shnaider, a 19-year-old Russian who made it to the second round of the Australian Open. She has already won a small WTA tournament.
Attending college, if only for a year, was Shnaider’s insurance against professional tennis that the war in Ukraine might ban Russians from competing. It was also much cheaper than paying the cost of coaching and court time in Moscow. After the team final, she becomes a professional player and travels to the French Open in Paris.
“It made me better,” Shnaider said of the college tennis experience.
Still, much of the tennis establishment has long looked down on the collegiate sport’s version, an institution big in the United States but not in other countries. For critics, campus life, which can include parties, chores, and exams, can distract from a focus on the sport and soften players compared to the rigors of the smaller leagues of the professional game.
David Roditi, a former tour pro who has coached Texas Christian for the past 13 seasons, said collegiate tennis has a uniquely noisy and pressurized proving ground that only experienced players can understand. Also, most players don’t peak until they’re 20 anyway, he said. So what’s the rush to go pro? He’s seen too many players burn out in lonely touring life long before their prime.
“They give up before they can figure out how good they could be,” Roditi said. “You get four years of security in college.”
There are of course limits to scholarships and the competition is generally not as fierce as it is on the pro circuits. Nevertheless, Roditi has been successfully selling the ideals of university sports abroad for several years. His team consists of players from Scotland, England, France, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. Jacob Fearnley, his top player, grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Fearnley said he was small as a teenager and needed time to develop and get stronger. It would have been foolish to go pro after high school, he said. Spizzirri, the Texas star, tells a similar story. Both are now long, lean and powerful.
Fearnley said he played pro tournaments at a low level, which was child’s play compared to what he learned in college. During an early away game against Michigan early in his collegiate career, the crowd would yell at him after every double fault, telling him he was a hopeless tennis player. He broke down then, but not anymore.
“It’s just noise,” Fearnley said before another showdown with Michigan the other day. “That’s what our coach tells us. You learn that the only thing that matters is you and your opponent and what’s happening on the pitch.”
Comments are closed.