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At age 28, Clancy Shields is a rising star among men's tennis head coaches. His Utah State team, which went 9-16 in Shields' first season last year, finished 2015 with an 18-9 record and a second-place finish in the Mountain West Conference.

It was only ten years ago that Clancy Shields was No. 3 nationally among high school seniors in TennisRecruiting.net's first-ever ranking of prospects. That made him one of the original blue-chip prospects. Shields signed with Boise State and was the Western Athletic Conference player of the year in 2009.

"Now I feel old," Shields said. "I've had some longer years, and some shorter ones, but the years I played in college went by in a blink of an eye. It's been crazy."

TennisRecruiting.net caught up with Shields last month to have him reflect on his life in tennis.

Shields offered advice for today's college prospects and revealed a few of his secrets that have helped him make the Aggies a team to be reckoned with.

Questions and Answers

Tennis Recruiting (TR): What was recruiting like for a blue-chip player 10 years ago?

Clancy Shields (CS): The funniest thing was that I never had a cell phone while I was being recruited. If a coach wanted to talk to me, he had to call my dad's cell phone, and my dad at the time wanted me to play pro. He wasn't so gung ho on the college part of it. So I felt in a lot of ways I was sheltered from the constant barrage of text messages and social media that recruits get today. The recruiting process was an interesting one for me because I was so close to my brother [Luke Shields, who is now the associate head coach at Boise State], who was two years older, that wherever he was going to go, I was most likely going to go. At the end of the day, blood was thicker than water.

TR: Was Boise State good in tennis before you went there?

CS: They were about No. 30-32 in the country, so they were very good year before I got there. Our goal was to win a national championship, and we had the team and talent to do it, but we unfortunately had a few injuries. My brother was a top-five recruit. I was a top 10 junior player, and we had another guy who made the semifinals at Kalamazoo. So Coach Greg Patton got three blue-chip recruits to come to a 'so-called' Podunk town in Idaho. We made the NCAA tournament all four years and as a senior we made the sweet 16.