How KU tennis — in six years — went from unranked to Big 12 champs
Todd Chapman chuckles now when retelling the story.
The sixth-year Kansas tennis coach is fresh off a Big 12 championship, won at home two weeks ago. He was just named the conference’s coach of the year, and his team — seeded 14th nationally — was chosen as a host school for this year’s NCAA Tournament; the Jayhawks take on Denver in the opening round at 1 p.m. Friday.
This kind of success, though, hasn’t always been the norm for KU tennis ... with Feb. 11, 2014, providing the best example of how far the program has come.
Chapman, as part of a group text with his team, remembers his phone pinging constantly that day: “This is so great!” “Oh gosh!” “We did it!”
The accomplishment? KU, in Chapman’s first season, had cracked the Intercollegiate Tennis Association national rankings.
At No. 70.
“Now we all sit around and laugh that we — and they — were excited about that,” Chapman said. “It’s one of those things now ... it’s continuing to check things off the list to where we think this program can go.”
Perhaps no one saw the vision of what KU could be earlier than Chapman.
As an assistant coach for Texas Tech earlier this decade, Chapman traveled to Lawrence three times in four years for competition, leaving town with the same thought each time: Why can’t the Jayhawks be more successful?
Chapman was impressed by the campus, the facilities and knew the school had some history of tennis accomplishment in the 1980s and ‘90s. He even told his boss at the time — Texas Tech coach Todd Petty — that if the KU job came open, he was going to pursue it.
“I felt something. It’s hard to describe,” Chapman said. “I just knew we could be good here.”
His enthusiasm was evident when he interviewed in 2013. Chapman talked about the challenges he’d worked with at Texas Tech — a program that had gone from not ranked in the top 100 to Big 12 champion in three years — and reiterated his confidence that KU could overcome the same obstacles. He believed in building a program that wouldn’t just chase top players, but instead would work to create depth up and down the roster.
He also set the standard high immediately, saying even on down years, KU tennis should be an NCAA Tournament team.
“He came across immediately as a thoughtful, determined coach who cared about what he did,” said Jim Marchiony, KU’s sports administrator for women’s tennis for the past decade who was in on the interviews. “We thought he’d be a good fit.”
And after getting hired in June 2013, Chapman didn’t waste time creating a new big-picture vision.
He started with expectations, sensing that was what needed to change most immediately. In the first meeting with his team, he told players he wanted them to be able to hold their heads high when they wore KU tennis gear around campus; one of the goals, he said, would be for people to associate the team with hard work and success.
“I wanted (the players) to have that pride in the program,” Chapman said. “I didn’t feel like it was necessarily there at the time. That’s something you can control.”
Setting a culture was next. Chapman preached to his player that there were five qualities they could control on a daily basis: effort, attitude, energy, coachability and competitiveness.
Take care of those, Chapman told his team, and improvement would come.
And if they didn’t succeed in those areas ... well, they were going to hear about it.
This was another important shift. Chapman knew his team would have to embrace tough love.
Chapman, the son of a high school basketball coach, said one of the most important lessons he’d learned from his father, Bill, was this: Results don’t come from thin air, and they usually aren’t the result of miracles.
What’s earned is typically achieved through hard work, and that was going to be the foundation for KU’s progress.
Chapman believed the strength and conditioning department had been underutilized before his arrival; he changed that once he started. He worked to let players know that he cared about them, in part because he knew that challenging them in both practice and film sessions would be needed if they wanted to grow.
“We’re very tough on ‘em,” Chapman said. “It’s being able to respond because you know your coaches want the best for you.”
The initial buy-in was sped up by some early success. Chapman mostly inherited the same roster in his first season, but after garnering its initial No. 70 ranking, the team two weeks later moved up to the highest mark (45th) in school history.
Chapman has built from there.
His 2015 recruiting class of Nina Khmelnitckaia, Anastasiya Rychagova and Janet Koch were a big reason for the recent success, as all three earned first-team All-America honors this season and have helped the team to four straight NCAA Tournament berths.
Yet, KU has had more going for it than that. When the Jayhawks defeated top-seeded Texas 4-2 to clinch the Big 12 championship two weeks ago, Marchiony couldn’t help but notice how the team had accomplished the feat. KU won the doubles point, then also had won at No. 4, 5 and 6 singles.
Chapman, in other words, had built the type of depth that he’d first promised in his interview.
“He had a plan from the beginning,” Marchiony said.
So much has changed since Chapman’s first season. Not only does the team have a new home — Jayhawk Tennis Center at Rock Chalk Park opened in December 2016 — but the team also has higher aspirations after falling in the second round of the NCAAs last season.
“We’re not catching anybody by surprise at this point,” Chapman said.
That, in itself, is an accomplishment.
As is this: Chapman said six years ago he couldn’t identify what KU tennis’ identity was.
He believes, thanks to a blue-collar mentality, the Jayhawks have that covered now.
“It’s a lot of hours if you want to be good,” Chapman said. “I think we’ve just had a group, a team, and especially these three seniors that bought into that four years ago and helped the rest of the team over the last four years realize: ‘This is the Kansas way now.’
“I think we now have a team that realizes what playing for Kansas means.”
This story was originally published May 2, 2019 at 6:03 PM with the headline "How KU tennis — in six years — went from unranked to Big 12 champs."
