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HOSE MOTHER
are you?" tennis coach Judy Dixon remembers a stewardess asking a few
years ago, as she waited with the UMass men's tennis team in the Pittsburgh
Airport en route to a tournament in Virginia.
"I'm their coach," replied Dixon.
"You're the coach of a men's team? How
do they feel about that?" the stewardess asked.
"Well, I guess you'll have to ask them,"
Dixon responded with equanimity.
The answer is, they feel fine about it. Better
than fine. And the women's team feels likewise about Dixon, the
1997-98 Atlantic 10 Women's Tennis Coach of the Year and the
only female coach of men's tennis in the A-10 league.
After
all, there are the numbers. Last spring Dixon coached both teams to their
highest placement ever in the conference championships. She spurred the women
to an unprecedented second-place finish, and their performance so far this
fall has brought them closer to a national ranking than a UMass team has ever
been. Since Dixon became coach, UMass has for the first time sent both men
and women to All-Conference teams, besides sending women's cocaptain Jackie
Braunstein to A-10 All-Academic teams twice.
As anyone who plays tennis can attest, this is a sport keenly
sensitive to momentum, and it currently has a lot of momentum
at UMass. The promise of the men's and women's teams is palpable
not only in their stats, but in the panache with which they take
to the Boyden courts to practice together not separately as at
many other schools every afternoon in spring and fall. There
is none of what psychologists would call "off-task behavior"
to be seen.
ONE AFTERNOON this past September Dixon
agreed to let a couple of players at a time step to the sidelines
to talk about their work with her. Along with assistant coaches
Debbie Ginn and Justin Lynn, she remained on the courts, directing
drills and point play, noting players' moves from beneath the
bill of her hat and sunning her perpetually burned nose.
The respect and admiration that Dixon elicits
from her players blazed in the faces of the several upperclassmen
from each team who talked with us about the effect this former
pro has had on them and their games, and whether any of it has
to do with her being female.
"The whole reason I came here was because of Judy,"
said Todd Cheney, the number-one singles and doubles player.
"Every person I talked to had nothing but good to say about
her. I look at her as a coach, not as a woman or a man."
"It's impossible not to have respect
for her," said singles player Parsa Samii, whose high school
coach was also a woman. "She played on the tour, and was
a high-level player at USC. There's a lot of respect for her
experience."
"She can put the ball wherever she wants,"
emphasized Robbie Manchester, number-two singles and number-one
doubles player. "If she's using a cone in a drill, she can
hit the cone nine out of ten times."
The male players are in consensus that as
for technical instruction, they get everything from Dixon they'd
get from a man. As for other aspects of being on a team, Dixon
provides more than most men, they say.
"We're like a family," said captain
Kevin Curley. "Both teams cheer for each other. We hang
out together. And we're disciplined. Other teams, the guys straggle
in, they're yelling, they're all dressed different. We're in
shirts and ties."
"When we're at tournaments, everyone
knows she's in control," said Manchester. "If we were
sloppy like some other teams, they might make comments, saying
it's because she doesn't have control."
"I don't think I've ever heard guys on
other teams make a comment about it," said Curley.
"She's the most dedicated coach in New England," concluded
Cheney.
Dixon's dedication is combined with shrewdness.
One example is pitting the women's skills in practice against
those of the generally larger, stronger men. The result so far
has been that the women, with a tougher schedule in actual competition,
have edged ahead of the men in A-10 championship success.
Jackie Braunstein, a strong singles player,
says the best thing about the co-ed practice is the fostering
of support: "At matches, we know they're there," she
said in September. Co-captain Gillian Kane agreed. Last year,
when the women played against George Washington in the A-10 championship
semifinals, "our guys were there in the stands, yelling
and cheering."
Perhaps even more to the point, "doing
drills with the guys picks up our games," said Braunstein.
According to Ola Gerasi-mova, the Russian-born number-one singles
and doubles player, "Playing against the guys we learn quicker
reflexes, we learn to end the point. This practice is especially
useful when we play Ivy League teams; they're tough."
A few minutes later, Gerasimova and freshman
Helena Horak squared off against Curley and freshman Bill Greener
in some point play, and the women took to the net and dispensed
volleys with the speed, precision, and power of Jurassic Park
velociraptors. At one point the vigilant Dixon, noticing that
Curley had been about to hit a putaway volley but opted for something
less lethal, said, "Kevin, don't stop yourself. You wouldn't
do that in a men's match. Make the play. She's okay she's going
to get you back."
THE STRENGTH OF the women's team has a lot to do with practicing
with the men," said Dixon in her office later that afternoon.
Although for most point play and cooperative drills women work
with women and men with men, for some point play and in footwork,
balance, and feed and strength drills the sexes work together.
"The men are not less intense because they're practicing
with the women," said Dixon. "For example in relays,
the men's attitude is `OK, I'm going to run,' and they're very
competitive and loud. They don't hold back. Being exposed to
this competitiveness, the women push harder.
"I expect the same intensity, work ethic,
and commitment from both teams," Dixon added. "There's
no `not finishing' the three miles. There's no getting to practice
`whenever.' The bar the standard is the same."
This isn't to say that coaching women is the
same as coaching men. "Women are much, much more sensitive
and more relational," Dixon declares, firmly enough to quell
any suggestion that this might be a stereotype. "There are
more nuances working with women," says this adored coach,
herself the mother of a daughter and a son.
If a player has an issue with her, "A
guy will leave it off the court; a woman will carry it onto the
court," says Dixon. If the players are having a problem
with a teammate, the men will confront him; the women will be
more hesitant, more inclined to talk with Dixon about it.
Building on the strengths of both sexes, tennis
at UMass is in a good position, poised to break into the national
tier of competition. You can read it in the statistics and see
it on the practice court. You can also see it in Dixon's office,
where, in addition to piles of paperwork relating to this year's
teams schedules, rosters, the welcome-back letter that went out
to all this summer with "twelve ideas to think about"
plus details of the "single-court suicide" and other
drills is a file rack starting to fill up with folders from applicants
for next year's teams.
Those new players will be subject to the same
drill. Says Dixon, "I tell the kids, it isn't `men's tennis'
and `women's tennis' here. It's `the UMass tennis program.'"
Deborah Klenotic / photos by Ben Barnhart
