In his sixth season as women’s tennis coach, Hans Olsen is starting to reap the benefits of five years of recruiting.
This season marks the second year Olsen has had only players his staff recruited on the team. With N.C. State ranked No. 43 in the latest FILA Collegiate Tennis team rankings, and with freshman Daria Petrovic ranked No. 43 in the latest FILA Collegiate Tennis individual rankings, the program is moving in the right direction, according to Olsen.
Once a coach gets all his or her own players, dividends can be seen, Olsen said. Coming in as a new coach in 2001, Olsen was faced with the same task every new coach must face: blending players recruited by a former coach.
“You’re trying to convince a player that came because of a former coach’s style to try it a different way,” he said. “Any time you’re inheriting players from a former coach, it’s more of a process. It takes time to get everybody on the same page.”
One complication, Olsen said, is during the recruiting process, a coach can target a certain player because of an aspect of her game. The coach can have a plan of what to do with the player when she arrives on campus.
“We’ve seen them play,” Olsen said. “We already have a plan. We hit the ground running with people joining the program now. Months of preparation and planning are at work.”
That kind of planning does not exist when a coach enters a new situation with players he or she did not recruit for a specific system.
Olsen said he and assistant coach Mait DuBois are working toward a specific goal when they recruit.
“For me, it starts with the character of the person,” Olsen said. “The people that are seniors now, it’s their character first that got them to be a part of this team, and then their talent and work ethic.”
Freshman Kate Green said she remembers talking about attitude and character with Olsen during her recruiting process.
“It was very important to him for us to have a good attitude, to be hard workers and to be positive,” Green said.
Senior Lauren Barry said the coaches’ recruiting has created a nice mix both on the court and in the locker room. “Coach Olsen’s done a great job recruiting girls who are good on the court, who also have a good personality and blend well with the team we already have,” she said. “We work together in such a way that the team is very strong. He has a good eye for character. Everyone that comes in works well with everyone here.”
The junior and senior leaders on the team were all recruited by Olsen’s staff. Olsen said when the players were recruited, the coaches were looking for leadership potential. Now, he said the program is seeing the recruiting come to fruition in the leadership of the current upperclassmen. Olsen said it’s something that propels itself “once things get moving in the right direction.”
Olsen said the cohesiveness the team exhibits is a by-product of the players all having been recruited for a similar system of training and competition.
“The girls that are here are setting a tone,” Olsen said. “Now, they’re doing things the way we’ve done them for years. It’s natural for new players to look around, and say, ‘Oh, OK. We do it that way.’
Players look around and see that we really push each other and work hard. We don’t waste any time.”
Barry and her twin sister Allison were recruited walk-ons. Lauren Barry said they had a chance to watch a few matches and spend some time with the team. She said the visit made picking State an easy decision.
“It was an instant hit for us,” Lauren Barry said. “Right away we could tell everyone was really close, and they were really encouraging of each other. It was the perfect place for us.”
Olsen said every tennis program in the country says it trains hard, and it is a cohesive team unit. But, he said, only certain programs actually back it up when recruits take official visits.
According to Olsen, State is one of those programs.
“Everybody here gets along great, and we train at the highest level,” he said. “They come spend a few days with the team, and when they leave, they know we are true to that. Our players, in junior tennis, did good things. And then they come to this team, and they do great things. That’s a testament to our training.”