Lily McCabe
Senior Fons Van Sambeek forehands the ball during his singles match versus Cal at J.W. Isenhour tennis center on Friday, Feb. 28, 2025. Von Sambeek won his singles match 2-0 (6-2, 6-1). The Wolfpack beat the Golden Bears 4-2.
NC State men’s tennis reached its highest-ever ranking in program history at No. 6 in the ITA national rankings on March 10, 2020.
The Wolfpack, led by head coach Kyle Spencer, didn’t play another match that season.
While the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the Wolfpack’s potentially-best season in program history, there’s no stopping Spencer’s squad in 2025. Five years later, NC State has climbed its way back to its highest ranking in history at No. 6 per Tuesday’s ITA rankings.
Spencer has led his team back to No. 6 by engineering a team and program culture designed around family, perseverance, competition, effort and simply living in the moment.
The Pack’s head coach since 2017, Spencer led his team to six wins against ranked teams this season, three of which have come against top 10 teams. Just like in the Pack’s impressive 4-2 win over then-No. 6 Stanford, NC State has found production from both the older, veteran players at the top of its lineup and the younger players at the bottom.
While seniors No. 24 Braden Shick and No. 55 Luca Staeheli lead the way on Courts 1 and 2, players such as redshirt freshman Jules Leroux and William Manning man the bottom of the lineup, providing crucial wins in each and every one of NC State’s ranked wins.
Spencer said these impressive results from his younger players in high-pressure spots were a product of a competitive culture within the team, one that drives his players to the peak of their potential.
“We’ve gotten production from a couple of the young guys, and they really handled the environment quite well,” Spencer said. “I will say, we compete a lot in practice in the sense of, we have a really competitive group — everybody wants to win everything. So they want to win a baseline game, they want to win a tiebreaker at practice, they want to win a sprint. And so that competitive drive really translates into the matches.”
This sense of competition in and out of matches inspires an impressive sense of fight that this NC State team displays more than any other in recent years. Spencer’s team prides itself on battling at each and every court during matches and persevering through the temporary failures you may experience during those matches.
“The one thing I know that we’re going to do is we’re going to fight in every position — one through three in the doubles and one through six in the singles,” Spencer said. “We’re going to fight, and we’re going to play for each other. And so to me, if we go and do those things, we’ll be in every match, and then it will just be how we handle certain situations.”
With this mentality, the Pack has not only separated itself from past iterations of the team, but also its competition.
This season, NC State has played more ranked matches than usual after competing in the ITA National Team Indoor Championships. That means more playing time and experience against the other best teams in the nation — something important to the success of the team in the long run.
The Wolfpack’s unprecedented success against these ranked teams has also been a product of Spencer’s culture. Traits like perseverance, a strong connection to its high-energy home crowd and living up to the occasion in the biggest, most important moments all stem from him.
However, it’s ultimately up to the players to buy in and follow through on that culture.
“We talk about perseverance, we talk about being a family, we talk about how these matches are about the environment and their unique occasions,” Spencer said.
This culture is what makes NC State able to stand up to and beat college tennis titans such as Stanford. Now a college titan in its own right, the Wolfpack is eyeing its best season in program history if it continues the trajectory it is on right now.
A perennially challenging set of ACC opponents stands in its way, but watch out for the red-and-white to make its deepest, most successful push for the remainder of the 2025 season, all built on the back of Spencer’s culture.
“The thing that I’m so, so proud of is the team environment and the family and the community that we’ve built here,” Spencer said. “And so that’s what we rest on, and that’s what we’re excited about. And the competition is an expression of all those things that are part of the foundation of our program.”