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Feature: Men's Tennis, After 17 Years, is Back in the NCAAs
May 06, 2015 | Men's Tennis
The NCAA men's tennis team tournament has been around since 1977, and Princeton was part of each of the first four 16-team draws, certainly a difficult bar to clear.
After 1980, Princeton made the tournament in 1994, again a 16-team draw, and in 1996, when the tournament expanded, the Tigers were there as well, included among the 40 teams in the field.
Until this week, 1998 was the last time Princeton achieved a berth in the NCAA men's tennis team tournament.
In the 17 years since, Princeton has knocked on the door, finishing the season ranked in the 60s in by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association in 1999, 2001 and 2011. Generally, the teams in the top 40 are the ones that get an at-large bid, and though the Tigers had winning Ivy League records in 10 of 15 seasons since 1999, things just never fell into place to win the Ivy's automatic bid.
In 1998, Billy Pate was the men's tennis coach at Georgia Perimeter College, a community college outside Atlanta, when won the first of three National Junior College Athletic Association titles, before getting a call from the University of Notre Dame in 2000 to be an assistant coach there.
That and the invitation to serve as the head coach at the University of Alabama two years later were important developments for him, and much later, for Princeton.
“I think it was important to have that experience at Notre Dame in the academic arena to understand a really difficult balance between what the athletes may go through with a rigorous academic curriculum and then achieving in tennis as well,” Pate says. “Those experiences obviously help, but in the SEC, the talent level we faced year-in and year-out, was great, but we also played the Ivies, so I knew the potential they had there.”
Alabama reached the NCAA team tournament seven times in Pate's 10 seasons there, winning a match three times and two matches twice, in 2003 and again in '09.
Meanwhile, the Tigers sniffed getting into the dance themselves. In 2011, Princeton started 6-0 in Ivy League play and headed to Cornell with a chance to seal the Ivy's automatic bid. The Big Red also entered the match without a loss in the Ivy and exited that way as well, winning the doubles point and splitting the singles matches to deny Princeton and end the Tigers' season.
A year later, Pate came aboard.
“I was surprised (that Princeton hadn't made the NCAA tournament since 1998), but at the same time, there's such a rich heritage of tennis success here,” Pate says. “You go back over the years and look back at their records, there's been some tremendous players here. I was growing up in the 80s playing tennis, and those (Princeton) teams were great, top-10 national teams. I remember some of the players that went on to the tour. I think in taking the job, certainly with that in the back of my mind, I had a vision for hopefully one day we could achieve some of those things, and that's certainly what we've set out to do.”
One step toward getting there was to load up a challenging schedule. Of the eight ITA-ranked opponents Princeton played in 2012, the last year before Pate arrived, four of them were in the Ivy, a testament to how tough the league was and is. Princeton played 12 ITA-ranked teams in Pate's first year, five of those in the Ivy, and came within a few spots of snagging an at-large bid, ending the season ranked 51st in the nation. It was 13 nationally ranked teams last year, and Princeton ended the season with a lineup that included three freshmen in both singles and doubles, two seniors and junior Zack McCourt in his first year as the team's No. 1.
Then came this season. The freshmen of a year ago, particularly Tom Colautti, Alex Day and Josh Yablon, representing three countries, were back in the lineup, and McCourt, again at the top of the lineup, was back for his last go-round. Dan Richardson, an Alabama native whom Pate knew from his time in the state, was back from a year off, and four freshmen came aboard. That lineup met 17 ranked teams, not counting the Minnesota club the Tigers will face Friday. The team responded well, winning five of its first seven of those matches and being rewarded with its highest ITA ranking on record since 1980, at No. 23 in the nation.
The players, McCourt said, have bought in.
“The energy and the enthusiasm and the commitment that the team has to tennis and to each other, it's incredible,” McCourt said. “Billy has done all kinds of incredible things for the program. He cares so much for every guy on the team like they're his own sons, and you can really see that.
“He's just got such a good sense of humor that when he gets on the court and when he starts instructing and discusses big-picture development, the guys really buy into everything that he's preaching. Guys are really able to trust him because they see how much he cares.”
The wins, for the most part, kept coming, with the team getting a big lift from a win over then-No. 22 Harvard in San Diego to conclude the spring break trip. That momentum carried right through the first two weekends of the Ivy season, and Princeton, then at 18-6, was two wins away from matching the 1995 team for the most wins in program history.
Twenty wins is still on the table. The team stumbled against Dartmouth, Harvard and Columbia, and was in danger of seeing the NCAA tournament drought go on another year before mustering enough to get a 4-3 win at Cornell to stand ranked 36th heading into the NCAA selection announcement.
All the matches, all 10 of the wins against ranked teams, were enough. Though the Tigers had to sweat it out until the last quarter of the bracket was announced, Princeton was there, for the first time since 1998, going to the NCAA team tournament.
It's one step, and Pate aims for more.
“Clearly our goal is to win the Ivy,” Pate says. “That's maybe a better way to get in, when you know (you're getting in), but at the same time I think it says a lot about our team and our league right now that we were able to secure a spot in the tournament through the at-large route, which may be equally as impressive as winning the Ivy, in some respects. We're really excited for the league. We're excited for Princeton tennis and our women's team as well, so it's a really exciting time to be a part of it.”
A win Friday against Minnesota would be Princeton's first postseason victory since 1979 and would match the '95 team at 20 wins.
Though it can't be achieved this year, with Princeton heading to Virginia to compete in the NCAAs, the aims for more are there. The Cordish Family Pavilion, opened in 2011, would be a pleasant venue from which to watch an NCAA tournament match at the Lenz Tennis Center, where the Tigers played their last NCAA contest in '98.
It's a scene Pate wouldn't mind seeing realized.
“(We're) obviously looking forward to building on this,” Pate says. “And hopefully compete and win the league title and have these kind of selection show parties every year.”