Commitment Profile
Fall Signing Week '11: Muliawan Heads to Princeton
by Rhiannon Potkey, 10 November 2011
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Many players scan the top 25 rankings before selecting what colleges they might want to attend.
Amanda Muliawan did the same, only the rankings she checked were those found in the "U.S. News & World Report."
Academics are a high priority for Muliawan, and the blue-chip recruit isn't willing to compromise her standards when it comes to playing college tennis.
"I wanted a school that put academics on the same level as athletics. I didn't want there to be an imbalance in either way," Muliawan said. "I wanted to be able to grow as a tennis player and first and foremost get a good college education."
Muliawan narrowed her options to Vanderbilt, Harvard and Princeton.
But once the Wyckoff, N.J., resident visited the Princeton campus, the choice became a no brainer.
She wanted to be a Tiger.
"There was something about Princeton that was the right fit for me specifically," Muliawan said. "There was almost a tangible feeling in the air when I was around the team and attending classes. I felt like it was something that I could do for the next four years and love doing it."
Muliawan has received only one B in high school and even that was a B+. Her grade point average is 5.772 on a 5.0 scale.
"I feel like being well rounded, and being able to do well on the tennis court and in the classroom is probably one of the most important things in life," she said. "You are not always going to be a tennis player no matter where tennis takes you on the collegiate level or pro tour. Eventually you have to grow up and get a job."
Muliawan started playing tennis because of her older brother, James. He was diagnosed with Stage IV Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in the fourth grade.
After radiation and chemotherapy was successful, he wanted to return to sports.
His doctor advised him to find a non-contact sport, and he discovered tennis.
Muliawan would go watch her brother take lessons.
"I would be sitting there with a coloring book or with friends and I eventually got bored enough to ask my mom for a lesson for myself," she said. "It eventually turned into something more along the lines of wanting to do it not for the sake of filling my time, but because I loved the sport. It kind of took off from there, and when I was eight or nine I realized I wanted to play tennis competitively."
Her fast rise in the sport surprised her mother. She promised Muliawan she could get a dog if she won a tournament.
"She was thinking it would be very far off, but I won the third tournament I ever played. The dog didn't come until two years later though," Muliawan said. "I named him Ace because I got him through tennis and thought that would be appropriate."
