Last week at the Rose café, our speaker was Varsity Tennis coach Silviu Tanasoiu. Being a sports fan, I was very excited when I heard that he was coming to rose house to speak. Two of the more interesting parts of Coach Tanasoiu’s discussion was centered on the recruiting of athletes all around the world and the balance between academics and athletics that his athletes have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. I was not aware of this but the recruiting for college tennis players appears to be more competitive than the other major college sports (basketball, football, etc.). In basketball and football there is a wider talent pool of athletes for coaches to choose from. In tennis, as Coach Tanasoiu explained, there are only a handful of players from around the world that are considered to be part of the upper eschelon in terms of talent, many of whom are foreign. What makes it more difficult to recruit is that many of these foreign players want to go pro and it takes a lot of convincing to get them to attend college in the U.S. These players want to come to Ivy league schools because if they are going to pass on making hundreds of thousands of dollars (sometimes even more) they want the best education they can get. This leads to the next interesting aspect of Coach Tanasoiu’s talk about how being a college athlete is essentially going to medical school and military school at the same time. The joke at many other colleges that have superior football or basketball teams is that the players are paid and that either don’t have to go to class or are enrolled in bs classes (cough, cough, Alabama, cough, cough North Carolina). Many of the student athletes on the Cornell tennis team are actually studying to become engineers. However, I do not know if they are being paid (probably not).

Coach Silviu Tanasoiu, in my opinion, is the epitome of what a college coach should be. He is passionate about what he does, he supports his players and he encourages them on and off the court. The story about when he wrote a letter to a recruit’s mom and how he had it translated to Russian so that she could read it shows who Coach Tanasoiu is as a person and how it translates into his coaching.