This week, the guest at Rose Scholars was Silviu Tanasolu, the coach of Cornell’s mens varsity tennis team.  At the beginning of the talk, he asked us how much we knew about tennis and varsity sports — most of us didn’t know much about the subject except for the varsity hockey team.  But that fortunately wouldn’t be a roadblock in appreciating the talk.

The talk followed five topics: the privilege of being a varsity athlete, the responsibility that goes along with it, the adversity of it, how to make that adversity useful, and how important relationships are.  He first spoke to us about the privilege: there are only 8 ivy league varsity tennis teams, each with only 6 players on it.  That means that only 48 people in the entire world get to play varsity tennis in the ivy league each year.  There is a better chance to win the lottery than there is to play ivy league varsity tennis.  This was a pretty clear view of how much privilege being a varsity tennis player here has.

Then he spoke about how much responsibility goes with that privilege.  The players have to be extremely intentional with their time.  I was amazed when I was told how many things athletes have on their plate, these tennis players specifically.  Each player has to wake up for early morning practice, then have time to eat and shower before their classes for the day.  Factoring in time to eat, time to study, and more practice time, these athletes have incredibly full schedules that they need to keep up with.  Coach Tanasolu mentioned that he is constantly aware of how difficult it is to balance this type of schedule, and he told us that he tries to remind the players to be grateful for this challenge, because it will help them so much in the future.

This tied into the adversity that Coach Tanasolu mentioned often in this talk.  He continued to push the point that the adversity that the players face lets them explore how far they can go, and to help them develop as a player, a student, and as a person overall.  I thought this was a very nice way to put it, and I think that the better that I keep track of my time, the better I will do.   These topics are not just important for athletes, they are important for everyone balancing time.

Some things that interested me were how international the team is, and how much time goes into recruiting these players.  I did not realize that Cornell actively recruited for varsity athletes, since I knew that the athletes here don’t get full ride athletic scholarships to go here, they have to get in on their own academic merit, like everyone else.  But I learned at this talk that our tennis players are actively recruited, with Cornellians traveling all over the world to get them to want to come here.  It was also interesting to me, but not as surprising, that so many people in other countries would value playing professional tennis over furthering their education.

I thought this talk was very interesting and I felt that I learned some valuable things from it.  I wish I could attend the tennis game on Saturday, but since I cannot attend, I’ll just send the team my good wishes from far away.  Go big red!