SPORTS
World
Class
Tennis
More stars, more good
teams clash in college
4
At 18, University of Florida freshman
Halle Cioffi hits backhands with text-
book perfection. So it wasn't much of a
surprise when Cioffi, who is ranked 46th in
the world, won the Virginia Slims tourna-
ment in Indianapolis last October. But
then came the zinger: Cioffi passed on the
$45,000 prize money so that she could re-
main an amateur and stay in school. "I
know what I want to do, as far as tennis
goes," says Cioffi. "But [turning pro] is a
very hard goal, and it would be easy for it to
not work out. If it doesn't, I'll always need
something to fall back on."
A rising number of serious tennis players
now share that long-range point of view. In
the past, some top men such as Jimmy
Connors (UCLA) and John McEnroe and
Roscoe Tanner (Stanford) enrolled in col-
lege before starting their professional ca-
reers. Because women mature faster physi-
cally than men, however, college tennis
was thought to stunt their competitive de-
velopment. That thinking is changing, says
Stanford women's coach Frank Brennan,
whose team has won the NCAA champion-
ship for the past two years. He notes that
Patty Fendick, Stanford's top player last
year, graduated and reached the semifi-
nals as a pro in this year's Australian Open.
"Certainly no one can look at Patty and
say, 'Poor kid, she should have turned pro
when she was 18'," says Brennan.
34 NEWSWEEKONCAMPUS
PHOTOS c 1988 DAVID MADISON
Big-time teaching: Stanford coaches Dick Gould, Caryn Copeland with player
College tennis is netting talented ath-
letes for several reasons. Cautionary tales
of players such as Tracy Austin and An-
drea Jaeger, who shot to the top as teen
professionals and then suffered injuries
and career burnout, have re-emphasized
the importance of being well rounded.
Then, too, the bloom is off the tennis mon-
ey tree of the '70s, so that many young
players are now happier to be All-Ameri-
cans than touring pros. The top-ranked
colleges offer players skilled instruction, a
strong schedule-and an education. Those
who pass that up for the pros run the risk
that they will "just rot on the vine," ac-
cording to Dan Magill, men's coach at the
University of Georgia.
The new popularity of college tennis also
owes something to its greater breadth and
depth. The traditional California power-
houses, Stanford, USC, UCLA and Pepper-
dine, still retain much of their clout-but
they no longer dominate the game. The
University of Georgia, for example, took
the NCAA men's championship last year
and in 1985. As many as 30 universities
are good enough to contend for NCAA Divi-
sion I tournament places in any season.
The sport still has a long way to go before
losing its elitist image, however; partly be-
cause of the expense, it remains largely a
white, middle- and upper-class preserve.
Only a handful of black players have ever
received tennis scholarships, says former
Wimbledon champion Arthur Ashe.
For all its glamorous trappings, college
tennis is rougher than fun and games. Var-
sity players usually put in several hours a
day of weight training and practice. After
he became University of Kansas women's
MAY 1988