Recruitment and recognition: A college tennis player’s personal perspective on the sport

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For prospective college tennis players, the end goal of transitioning from high school and junior-level tennis to NCAA Division I, II or II tennis takes lots of hard work.

If they’re looking to get an athletic scholarship and attend a Division I school, coaches won’t be recruiting them for how they practice, train, or manage their academics, time and money. The bottom line is that they’ll be recruited for their tennis.

“I was ranked 109 in the U.S. when I was being recruited,” said Lucy Williams, a Towson University junior and member of the Towson women’s tennis team. “I finished second in our state championships.”

Williams, 21, started playing tennis when she was 6 and committed to college tennis after her older brother earned a scholarship to play in college. She believed that while the level of play in high school was much lower than in the juniors, she felt that she was lucky that her team had four girls that were ranked in the nation’s top 200.

“It wasn’t as serious as college,” Williams said. “We only practiced two days a week and the players played a lot on their own.”

As far as choosing Towson, Williams said that the school and coach initially sought her out and found her as part of the year-round tennis recruitment process that many other schools take part in. She said that she didn’t want to go a school with a hugely successful tennis program like the University of North Carolina, since she would end up playing No. 6 singles instead of a higher singles spot.

“I wanted to go to a school that had football, so a big but small school,” Williams said. “The coach was really personable and sold me on it.”

Tennis at Towson is relatively small compared to other sports like football, basketball and lacrosse, which are much larger operations and are more actively promoted by the university. Towson also lacks a men’s tennis team; the men’s program was cut after the 2003-2004 academic year.

“Sometimes I feel we’re not as recognized as much as other teams,” Williams said.

Williams believed that the most demanding aspect of being a college tennis player is the schedule, especially during her freshman year when she had six hours of mandatory study hall. But she felt that the long and arduous hours have been worth it for the experiences that come with playing college tennis.

“[One of my favorite memories was] playing in California as a freshman,” Williams said. “We got to go to downtown Los Angeles and go to Hollywood Boulevard.”

Covering lines and costs: Housing and finances as a college tennis player

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Some might expect that college tennis players, especially those in the higher NCAA divisions, don’t have any of the financial concerns that non-athletes have to deal with. They might also think college athletes in general have a relatively easy time adjusting from home life with their families to college life away from home.

But for Lucy Gloninger, a sophomore at Towson University and member of the Towson women’s tennis team, the transition from high school to college was no cakewalk.

“It was definitely difficult,” Gloninger said. “I was used to having my parents around me and at school you don’t have your parents.”

Gloninger, 20, had one of the more comparably local transitions to make out of the nine players on Towson’s roster, as five are international students that hail from Slovakia, Ukraine, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Towson’s tennis team has the highest proportion of international athletes out of all of its athletics programs.

“[Towson’s] about four hours from my hometown, which is Pittsburgh,” Gloninger said.

During the school year, Gloninger resides at the Berkshires at Town Center, an apartment complex in uptown Towson about 15 minutes walking distance from campus. Some schools offer stipends to student-athletes that move off-campus that are valued at what on-campus housing would typically cost.

Gloninger’s athletic scholarship covers racquet stringing (albeit with only four types of string available), clothes and shoes. This is helpful given the NCAA’s strict player amateurism policies that are being challenged in favor of giving student-athletes salaries.

“I work over the summer teaching tennis at a golf club,” Gloninger said.

To fill this void, Gloninger said she depends on her parents for money towards everyday expenses. Yet even if she can’t be paid directly for her “job” as a college tennis player, she can graduate college having gained beneficial professional skills from her college tennis experience.

“It helps with time management and teamwork, as well as hard work and self-discipline,” Gloninger said.

All things aside, the ability to play college tennis may have been the determining factor as to why Gloninger chose to come to Towson in the first place.

“[If I didn’t play,] I still would have gone to college,” Gloninger said. “But probably not Towson.”

“What social life?”: The social aspect of being a college tennis player

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One might expect that college tennis players, with both their academic and athletic time commitments considered, wouldn’t be able to have what most college students would deem “a proper social life.”

But according to A.J. Gomer, a junior at Towson University and member of the Towson women’s tennis team, college tennis doesn’t have to suck the social life right out of student-athletes.

“Personally, [college tennis] hasn’t affected my social life that much,” she said. “Once I met my teammates I became friends with them.”

Gomer, 20, credited living on campus, including living on the international floor of Residence Tower her sophomore year, for allowing her to meet a lot of people outside of athletics. She said it hasn’t been difficult for her to be socially active with friends outside of tennis.

“People don’t have to play sports for me to connect with them,” she said.

Gomer, a California native, said while not having a car at school limits what she can do on weekends, there’s usually events or matches on the weekends that take up much of her time anyway.

The NCAA’s amateurism policy also disallows student-athletes from working a job or anything that has to do with getting paid, which Gomer said wouldn’t be possible regardless as it’d interfere with practice times.

“If we wanted to play a tournament in-season, we couldn’t accept any of the [prize] money,” she said.

Despite the stress that’s associated with being a college tennis player and a student-athlete, Gomer said the feeling of wanting more free time to “sit on [her] butt and watch Netflix and eat ice cream” is one that everyone experiences.

“You can love tennis completely or have a love-hate relationship with it,” she said. “When it comes down to it, I don’t know what I’d do in my free time if I didn’t play.”

Gomer spends a lot of time with her teammates outside of practices, getting lunches or dinners together as well as going to the movies or otherwise getting together on the weekends. She also hangs out with her friends outside of athletics and has recently started going on hikes with her friends.

Additionally, she said college tennis hasn’t really affected how she uses social media. She noted how a large percentage of people she knows that play tennis constantly post about the sport on their social media pages.

“I don’t post a lot of tennis stuff,” Gomer said. “When I go out there, tennis is tennis and it’s a job I like to do.”

The “student” half of “student-athlete”: Academics and time management as a college tennis player

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College tennis players may have different athletic commitments compared to other student-athletes, but they share the arduous task of managing the “student” half of “student-athlete” just as much as other collegiate athletes.

Renate “Ren” van Oorschodt, 21, is a junior at Towson University and a member of Towson’s women’s tennis team. Named to the CAA All-Academic Team for the 2015-16 season, the Apeldoorn, Netherlands native is no stranger to the student-athlete balancing act.

“It’s difficult, but when you know you have things to do it’s just a matter of planning,” van Oorschodt said.

The Dutch business major, concentrating in international business and minoring in marketing, is taking 15 credits this semester and has nearly three years of experience with Towson’s management of student-athlete academics.

“Freshman year, our adviser was the athletics adviser and she helped me find out about classes,” van Oorschodt said. “Once I got into the business program, they put me with another academic adviser.”

Student-athletes are among the first to register for classes each semester so that they can have classes in the morning and reserve the afternoon for practice time with their team. At the beginning of each semester, student-athletes give their professors a form to sign with their match or game dates listed on it, then give the completed forms to the athletic adviser as a way of verifying that the professor knows when the athlete will miss class.

One such conflict is coming up next week: Towson’s tennis team travels to Elon, North Carolina Wednesday morning for the weekend-long CAA Conference Championship tournament, with first round play starting Thursday.

“I have an exam that week, so I asked my professor if I could reschedule it for the week afterward,” van Oorschodt said.

Besides helping with assignment due dates and course registration, the athletics department’s other academic services include tutoring for subjects such as math for an hour a day and providing places for student-athletes to study.

Van Oorschodt says that the amount of time per day she devotes to homework and studying varies depending on if it’s a match day, but she typically allocates about two and a half hours a day to her studies. The hardest part, however, isn’t the work itself; finding motivation to get it all done is harder, according to van Oorschodt.

“After practice, you really don’t want to do anything, or after a match,” van Oorschodt said.

With such a busy schedule as both a college student and a college athlete, van Oorschodt knows how critical time management is to her daily life. She maximizes the limited time she has by implementing a checklist of various tasks she needs to do, saying that she feels a sense of satisfaction once she checks something off the list.

“I always write down at the beginning of the week what I need to do, even little things like sending an email,” van Oorschodt said. “Once I’ve done it, I put a checkmark next to it.”

Practice makes perfect: Training and practice regimens for college tennis

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A photo of Towson's women's tennis team warming up before a Sunday morning match in 2016.

Towson’s tennis program, like the school’s other athletics programs, prides itself on having focused practice and training sessions.

The women’s tennis team, under the direction of Interim Head Coach Jamie Peterson, spends about an hour and a half to two hours a day, six days a week, on the court for practices. The team’s off-court training, which consists of weight lifting, conditioning, and yoga, usually takes up five to eight hours per week outside of practice.

“My goals for a typical practice are to have a very focused practice and to look for consistency in terms of effort and attitude during practice,” Peterson said. “That carries over into matches.”

The team has a much busier match schedule in the spring compared to the fall, as the latter mostly consists of weekend tournaments and invitationals instead of dual matches consisting of six best-of-three-sets singles matches and three best-of-one-set doubles matches. The United States Tennis Association has a sample off-season conditioning plan for college tennis players that gives a rough idea of Towson’s fall training.

“Fall is considered a little bit more of the off-season, so we work a little harder off the court,” Peterson said. “In the spring, we have so many matches and when you get to a certain point it’s kind of hard to push really hard.”

The team’s practices usually start with a dynamic stretching routine as a group, then they do a couple of laps and some footwork drills with an agility ladder before picking up their racquets to hit around and warm up their groundstrokes and volleys.

“Most of the time I’m running practices on my own since the volunteer assistant [coach] isn’t there,” Peterson said. “It’s challenging to work with eight people doing anything.”

The drills and strategies vary depending on the day and what the team is focusing on, but practices typically include live ball drills to work on a certain shot or stroke, such as down-the-line backhands.

“You’ve got eight players and you’ve got different players that need to work on different things,” Peterson said. “You’ve got to find a fine balance so that people get to work on what they need to work on.”

An alumnus of the former Towson men’s tennis program, Peterson noted that while the women’s team’s practices nowadays aren’t all that different from when he was a collegiate player, the off-court training has evolved considerably over the years.

“We just didn’t really do the exercises, and athletic training has come such a long way,” Peterson said. “We did some off-court conditioning, and some of it may have been in practice, but nowadays we spend practice time hitting balls and focusing on conditioning off court.”

Peterson, in his first year as a full-time coach at Towson after two years as an assistant coach, introduced yoga as part of the training regimen for this season as well as a new post-workout injury prevention routine.

“I’m trying to get their off-court program focused more toward tennis, such as lifting,” Peterson said.