The Monday Edition

The Ivy League is an athletic conference featuring eight of the most selective colleges in the country. In addition to academic excellence, those institutions are also able to field strong tennis teams - seven of the sixteen programs are ranked in the latest Campbell/ITA Rankings. They are able to compete at the highest level - and they do it without offering athletic scholarships.

What kind of students do coaches at Ivy League schools look for? Where does tennis fit in? We put these questions to several coaches around the Ivy League - hear what they had to say.

Questions and Answers

Q) What are some of the main factors you look for in student-athletes you recruit to your program?

Danielle Lund McNamara, Yale Women: The two biggest factors we recruit for are academic and tennis success in high school - current ability and potential to improve in college. However, these are not the only factors.

We also look for people who love tennis. People who are excited about working hard in college and developing their games, people with strong character and integrity who will mesh well with our team's philosophy and personality, and players who want to be a part of a mission to take Yale to the top of college tennis.

Chuck Kinyon, Dartmouth Men: I look for students/athletes who have shown high academic achievement and feel academics are a vital part of their college experience.

On the tennis side most of our players have been 4- or 5-star recruits. Every now and then I will go after a player that is ranked a bit lower - but who has shown improvement during his junior and senior year.

One of the most important assets for a junior player is to have set their tennis goals beyond college! I find that many have set their goals on college, and once they get to their goal - college - they bottom out.

Megan Bradley, Princeton Women: When I am recruiting for my program, I look for student-athletes that are going to be committed to their academics as well as their athletics. Although academics will always come first, I want our student-athletes to approach their tennis with the same commitment they would as if we are a top 10 program, because that is what we are striving for.

I am also looking for student-athletes who want to contribute positively to our team - and who understand the responsibility that comes along with representing Princeton University as a whole.

David Fish, Harvard Men: As an alumnus and coach, I look for players of whom I will one day be proud to say, "He's a Harvard graduate." Our goal is to use our small degree of influence in the admissions process to help the players who have had the discipline to accomplish a lot of the court, personally, and in the classroom.

We want to invest our efforts in players who will be a credit to Harvard... someone who, if he is not able to continue playing due to an injury, will become a credit to the university in other ways. So we look for good players who can also make it through the "whole person" filter of our admissions processes.

On top of that, since we all want to field competitive teams, we look for players who are not afraid to work and to fail, since there is no other way to get good at anything.

Bob Dallis, Dartmouth Women: The key to building a successful Ivy League program is to recruit players who love the game, who are striving for excellence and want to continue to improve, and who have great personalities and are looking forward to playing in a positive and fun team environment.

Also, there's a big difference between having a team filled with players who are playing because they want to play, not because they have to play in order to keep a scholarship.

Glenn Michibata, Princeton Men: The two main criteria are academics and whether they can make a positive contribution to the program.

While determining admissibility it is obviously more than just numbers, the initial information I need are SAT I and SAT II test scores as well as a high school transcript. To be able to contribute to the tennis program, a prospect has to have good success against his peers - or has to show that they have the potential to develop into a good singles or doubles player.

While rankings certainly help in the initial evaluations, the overriding factor is how I evaluate them after seeing them play and getting to know them better. I look to see how they handle pressure, how they compete on the court and whether they have good leadership skills.

Q) What are your goals for the program?

Bradley: The goal for our program is to be a top 20 team that consistently reaches the final site of the NCAA Championships.

On a conference level, we want to repeat as Ivy League champions and continue to compete for the title each year. We have great individual results this year from our top doubles team, and I would like to see more individuals competing in national events

Michibata: Our goal is to be a top 20-30 nationally ranked team - and to be consistently competitive for the Ivy League title.

McNamara: Our team's performance goals are to consistently be the best team in the Ivy League, to be a top-ranked national program, and to contend for a national championship.

Individually, our goal is to develop every player on our team over the course of her four years so that she can accomplish her collegiate tennis goals and prepare for tennis after college if she so chooses.

Kinyon: Our on-court goal as a team is to win the Ivy League Championship. Along the way, it is imperative for the players to grow as individuals and as team players. It is not always easy for the guys coming off the junior tennis circuit to suddenly become a team player.

Four years down the road, the student will be playing for a team in the work force and it is imperative that they understand the group dynamics involved - and the individual responsibilities that go with being successful.

I believe that the experiences that our players have had playing tennis at Dartmouth have significantly contributed to their success in the real world following college.

Q) How do your players balance tennis with the rigors of highly-competitive academics?

Dallis: Student-athletes who have the academic credentials to gain admission to an Ivy League institution have been balancing rigorous academics with high-level tennis their whole lives. They are looking to be challenged academically, and they want to get a first-rate education - testing their limits in the classroom while also playing Division I tennis. So while there's an adjustment to college-level academics, it's a transition they make pretty smoothly.

But this goes back to recruiting - you have to recruit student-athletes in order for them to successfully manage the balance. Otherwise it's going to be a very difficult transition.

Keep in mind that it's also extremely difficult to become an Ivy League student-athlete. There are about 25 student-athletes who join Ivy League women's tennis teams each year, compared to around 600 players who go to scholarship schools each year. It's an elite club.

Michibata: Our players have been able to balance academics with tennis by being very good with their time management. They are productive with their time - which has allowed them to train as hard as at non-Ivy League schools while also getting one of the best undergraduate educations in the world and to experience the normal college life.

McNamara: The players on our team are very disciplined, organized, and driven young women. They manage their time very well, and they have to make sure they have their priorities set clearly.

Academics come first, tennis is a close second, and with the little free time they have remaining they choose to get involved in different activities on campus and in the community. As coaches, we work very closely with each player to ensure that they're able to achieve their academic and tennis goals.

Kinyon: They work very hard on their time-management skills! We start each year with our team academic advisors and academic skills director making presentations to the team. Over time, the team has developed a tradition of academic excellence. Last year, the Dartmouth team had eight ITA Academic Award winners, and last spring term four of our players had 4.0 GPAs.

Bradley: My student-athletes truly understand the meaning of time management.

Princeton is unique in that between 4:30 - 7:00 pm there are no academic activities scheduled. That break allows us to practice without limiting the courses the student-athletes can take - and gives them time to solely focus on their athletics.

The Princeton student-athlete is committed to excellence both on and off the court, and through that commitment they are able to find a balance that allows for work and play.

I think their experience at Princeton better prepares them for the rigors of the world they will face when they graduate.

Fish: People who come to the Ivy League are very motivated, but they have an embarrassment of riches: they are skilled on the court in addition to many other skills that they want to also develop. Because they are not paid to play tennis through an athletic scholarship, they have a choice. Nobody makes them play. Unquestionably, some do use their tennis to gain admission and do not choose to continue to play, but many do, and some of them improve remarkably...

Those who do choose to continue to put their energies into tennis in the Ivies have shown that they can compete at all levels of the game. Everyone knows that James Blake reached #4 in the world and was a member of the World Champion U.S. Davis Cup team two years ago. This championship team in general was a ringing endorsement of the college system as a whole - the coach and three of the four players attended two of the top academic institutions in the country!

In the '80s, Princeton's Ted Farnsworth won what later became the ITA National Indoor Championships. Glenn Layendecker of Yale reached the top 50 in the world. Howards Sands was a three-time All American.

It's easy to criticize some Ivy players as under-achievers. You'll find players on every team like this. But in the Ivies, the accomplishments of players are more fairly judged through a wider lens - one which factors in the challenges Ivy players are willing to take on in the classroom.

Fact is... the Ivies have fine coaches who would do well anywhere, but we choose to remain within the Ivies because of the caliber of students we work with. The Ivy League is remarkably close and competitive. Ivy players - those who chose to do so - get a lot better. And they do all of this while immersed in the demanding and rigorous process of getting a great education.

One might ask why so many players want to transfer into the Ivies... it can't be all that bad!