The last couple of years have been rocky for the USM women’s tennis team.
Coaching changes, little recruiting, and a general lack of interest sent the program into a three-year tailspin. But now, with a new coach and some newfound interest, the team is back in the win column for the first time since 2005 and hoping to return the program to its glory days.
The downward trend of the team started at the end of the 2004 season when 10-year coach Wayne St. Peter left the squad for unspecified reasons following a disappointing 2-9 campaign. What ensued was the three-year losing drought, which ended last week when the 2008 Husky squad blanked Pine Manor 7-0.
“We had some unfortunate and untimely turnover (with the Women’s team),” said Al Bean, Director of Athletics. “Continuity in coaching is huge, recruiting hadn’t been done at the end of the 2004 season, and it’s hard to a get a solid group of players willing to commit, when no recruiting is being done.”
Continuity is something that didn’t come easy for the team during the next two seasons.
Two weeks before the start of the 2005 season, Ben Putnam was hired, and scrambled to find just enough girls to play even though five girls returned from the previous years squad. (7 girls are needed to actually compete in a team contest without forfeiting one of the matches).
This laid the foundation for the troubles to come. With no recruited players and more energy spent scrounging for players than working on forehands and service volleys, the team’s fate was all but decided.
The team struggled in conference play that year, finishing the season in fifth place. And yet another coaching change ensued. Lori Towle was brought on to right the ship, but only returned one player to the 2006 squad. With no nucleus of young players because of the coaching changes, the team was hard up.
“If you don’t recruit anybody for two or three years, then those classes are vacant, instead of trying to turn over three or four players, your trying to get ten,” said Al Bean.
The 2006 season came and went without a conference victory and Towle vacated the position, meaning that the team would have its fourth coach in as many years for the 2007 season.
Enter Hans Romer.
But Romer was not immediately successful. The same results continued and the team again went winless in the 2007 season, but there was hope. Romer would return for another year.
“It’s not that easy to find players, it seems that all the really good players want to leave Maine, ” says current coach Hans Romer.
Romer, a local tennis pro at the Portland Country Club, was hired less than two weeks before the start of the 2007 season.
“I started a year ago, and if you have a bad team for two and a half years, it takes the new coach almost that long to rebuild the talent, there is always a revolving door effect of players coming and going,” Romer added.
In his second year as the head coach, Romer has already experienced some difficulty in getting some girls to step foot onto the courts.
“I’ve been recruiting left and right, I’ve got a list of around 20 or so players, but most of them disappeared for various reasons a couple hours before the first practice started,” said Romer.
The team has even run print ads trying to entice players to join the squad, but often to no avail.
Nevertheless, Romer seems to be making strides. The team’s win over Pine Manor was its first since Oct. 10, 2005.
“We are going in the right direction,” says Romer. “We’ve got our first win and all the girls are very excited about it.”
Romer acknowledged that sports aren’t always about winning — something he stresses in his coaching style.
“It’s about creating a fun group. We might not win the championship (this year), but it’s going to be a good atmosphere, and the girls will always look back on it as an exciting time.”
“We’re doing what we can to get the program back to where it was, I think its going to come back, but its going to take some time to recruit and get some players.” said Al Bean. “We lost a guy that was coaching for ten years and had recruited well during his time here.”
Romer is openly optimistic about the team’s future saying that his team should be a force in a few seasons: a far cry from the yearly rotation of coaches that preceded him.