When a journalist for the Gonzaga Bulletin who has watched professional players play attends the Stevens Center to report on a match between Gonzaga and Pepperdine, a whole new perspective of the sport is opened up. Mainly the differences between college tennis and professional tennis.
College tennis is always a team sport. When you play for a school, your teammates have your back. At the NCAA level, three doubles matches start out the event in which who ever wins the majority wins the doubles match. Following the doubles matches are six singles matches, each of which is worth one point for each team.
In professional tennis, this team dynamic is nearly nonexistent out of Fed Cup and Davis Cup. And many top pros these days opt out of playing those events.
That’s not to say you can go to a college tennis match and not see connections. Gonzaga vs Pepperdine had several connections to the pro tour. Last Saturday, Laura Gulbe, sister of former top 10 player Ernst Gulbis was playing #2 singles for Pepperdine against Gonzaga. Gulbe has achieved a career-high rank of 898 on the WTA.
Gonzaga managed to win the doubles competition after saving match points in the deciding match but were not as lucky in singles. Pepperdine boasted Luisa Stefani, an 18 year-old from Brazil who was #2 in the nation at the time and has achieved a rank of 1015 back in 2013. Stefani and Gulbe, the #1 and #2 players from Pepperdine respectively blew out the girls from Gonzaga, conceding three games each in the process.
The most amazing thing about this is that as good as those girls from Pepperdine were, neither have ever been ranked in the top 800 in the world. Granted, this can be explained that their college play interferes with them at the pro level, but it really makes you appreciate the level of tennis on all levels.
The downside of sports fans is that they don’t appreciate how good the professionals really are. Gonzaga tennis players are not ordinary tennis players either. They are all fantastic athletes who play and train every day. All of them were seasoned USTA players in their youth and were among the top ranked players in state. Nevertheless, when they come against some of the top schools in the nation, the scorelines are unfortunately meek. They can hang with them in rallies but are more often than not purely out matched.
What is crazy about this is that professionals are at even a higher level than that. Most people would stand in awe at how amazing Gonzaga’s players are, let alone Pepperdine, and furthermore the professional players. Knowing how much training the college athletes put into their sport makes it even a more taxing prospect of thinking how much the professional athletes do.
Continually attending high school, college, and professional tennis matches, really should help fans of the sport appreciate the several different playing levels in tennis and the gap that is between them all. One player might seem like a god at one level but would be made to look hopeless playing in a level above them.
That is the beauty of tennis as an individual sport; one can really see the qualities of one person as an individual athlete. In other sports, there is connective tissue in which it can be difficult to gauge the level of one player to the next because they are all working together.
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