On a glass table sat a stack of promotional posters for the Pitt women’s tennis team, but nowhere did it say this will be the program’s final year, the difficult end for one of the university’s 19 intercollegiate sports.
You could find the full season’s schedule at the bottom, under a shot of the roster’s seven players sporting their Pitt uniforms. On this Sunday morning, they took to the courts below the balcony at Oxford Athletic Center in Pine Township, trading points with North Carolina, the No. 2-ranked team in the country.
“It only took them until the last match to make the poster,” one disgruntled fan remarked. “That was very thoughtful of them.”
It was the last home match in the history of Pitt tennis, but the Panthers still have two left this weekend, followed by the ACC tournament next week. March 31, though, was a chance to say goodbye not only to Pitt’s four seniors, but the program at large, which began play in 1975.
Current Pitt staffers, athletes and administrators made the trek to Wexford, where Pitt eventually lost, 7-0, in a match that lasted more than 2½ hours. For some, it couldn't have lasted long enough.
“It’s definitely sad, and feels a little bit weird,” said Callie Frey, a former player from Mt. Lebanon who wanted to see off the current seniors before it all ends. “I haven’t really thought about that. I’m trying not to think about it. It will be sad.”
‘Where are you?’
Pitt’s decision in January to dissolve the program didn’t sit well with Frey then, and it certainly doesn’t now. As the only senior from the team last season, the emotions are still raw for Frey, an All-ACC academic team selection a year ago who went 65-73 in singles matches and 55-57 in doubles over her four-year career.
At the heart of her disappointment isn’t just that the athletic department and university opted to discontinue the sport she loves. It was the process behind the announcement, and the approach once it was made by athletic director Heather Lyke, now entering her third year with the Panthers.
“It’s so frustrating. I’m very open about my feelings toward people, and it’s just sad that an AD who says she cares about all these teams doesn't care about tennis at all,” Frey said. “Never came to a match. We had an alumni luncheon, you would expect her to be there, wasn’t there.
“She says she cares for student-athletes but clearly doesn't care about tennis.”
It was never going to be easy for Pitt to cut a sport for the first time since men’s tennis and men’s gymnastics were dropped in 1995. Women’s tennis suffered the most in the first five years of the school’s transition from the Big East Conference to the ACC, which has three of the sport’s top 10 teams at the moment.
A Pitt program that went 19-23 in conference play its final five years in the Big East started 1-69 in the ACC over the same regular-season span and has yet to win a league match this season, one that has been doomed from the start.
“From the beginning of the season, it was weird,” said coach Alex Santos, who took over the program when it joined the ACC. “Because, obviously, you know you will be fighting for something that will end, which is not easy to do. But I think the girls have been doing a fantastic job.”
Consternation from inside and outside the team began when the players were told of the decision at practice the same morning the news was made public. The season would begin eight days later, leaving the three non-seniors on the all-international squad blindsided and thinking about their futures out of necessity.
Pitt’s two sophomores and one freshman would be allowed to stay on athletic scholarships, if they chose to remain enrolled, but all three came to the United States to play tennis in college. So far, Brazil native Claudia Bartolome has signed to play next year at Southern Methodist, while fellow sophomore Camila Moreno of Argentina and freshman Mariona Perez Noguera of Spain are undecided.
“I was so upset,” Bartolome said of her initial reaction. “I didn't expect it because I really like Pitt. I had to accept it.”
Bartolome acknowledged that she suspected the program might be eliminated, but she thought it would be a year or two down the road, perhaps after her Pitt career was over.
From Pitt’s viewpoint, if cutting the sport was inevitable, the timing might make sense now, More than half the players were already seniors, and how could Santos or any other coach be expected to recruit with an expiration date looming? But the underclassmen were left scrambling, and many former players such as Frey found out the gut-wrenching information from social media.
“[March 31] was certainly an emotional day for everyone associated with our women’s tennis program. Although this will be the team’s final season, our tennis student-athletes — past and present — will always be members of our Pitt Athletics family,” Lyke said in a statement sent to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
“Discontinuing the program was an extremely difficult decision but also a necessary one to ensure opportunities for growth and success for our future student-athletes. We remain steadfastly committed to providing the finest student-athlete experience possible.”
The athletic department and Lyke declined repeated interview requests to address concerns about how the program’s final season was handled. The lead sport administrator for women’s tennis (among other teams) was in attendance for the home finale, but Lyke was not.
“I’m not surprised,” said Frey, who fired off this tweet to Lyke that afternoon: “where are you? you couldn’t show up to the last match in pitt tennis history? oh sorry, who am I joking - you never showed up to a match, ever. i’m wondering how you won the ‘sportswoman of the year’ award.”
“It’s so ridiculous … the last match [at home] and you couldn’t make time to come? It makes me really mad,” Frey said. “Same for the girls. Everyone feels that way, but they can’t really say anything. Me, I don’t care. I’m done.”
Complicated situation
Frey also balks at Pitt’s reasoning for why “continuing this program undermines our commitment to future student-athletes who should be receiving the highest-quality opportunities to compete and win,” as chancellor Patrick Gallagher put it in January. Pitt is the only women’s tennis program in the ACC that lacks an on-campus facility, and now it’ll be the only school in the conference without a team, one of just two universities among the power-five conferences to not sponsor the sport (Oregon State is the other).
There was no tearful goodbye to the Panthers’ home court, because Oxford Athletic Center turned out to be no more than a two-year Band-Aid — 20 miles north of Oakland — for a very real problem. The team bounced around from Monroeville to Washington’s Landing to Harmar, never finding a real home, and not being included in Lyke’s “Victory Heights” master plan released last year, which intended to transform Pitt sports facilities on campus.
“It’s a little bit far from campus,” senior Gabriela Rezende said of Pitt’s final home venue, “but everyone always tried to come. If you know someone’s driving, they would try to come in the same car.”
For Frey’s part, she didn’t have an issue with the coaching, even if Santos himself says “there’s a lot of things that I could’ve done better, that I want to improve and keep trying to be the best version of myself.” She also didn’t mind the trips that ended up being 30-45 minutes off campus just for practice, let alone matches. But she noted that other alumni made it known they didn't have great experiences playing tennis for the Panthers.
Pitt has never hid behind financial excuses for ridding itself of such a struggling program, despite the fact that tennis had the highest operating expenses ($25,969) per player of any team other than men’s basketball ($115,585), women’s basketball ($49,318) and football ($42,690) last academic year. That’s according to the Equity in Athletics Data Analysis report filed by Pitt for the 2017-18 fiscal year, one in which tennis accounted for 2.3 percent of the university’s total operating expenses for athletics. Starting in 2021-22, women’s lacrosse will fill the void left by tennis in the Pitt sports lineup, but, until then, the university will be down a program.
“They just had a meeting, they told us about it, and the reasons? I don’t think they are good reasons, to be honest,” said Bartolome, the sophomore headed to SMU. “If you want a program to continue, you can do it. The thing is, we didn't feel that support.”
In her previous stop, Lyke never disbanded any programs. But less than a year after she was hired at Pitt, Eastern Michigan announced it was dropping softball, men’s swimming and diving, women’s tennis and wrestling, citing budgetary constraints. Last summer, softball and women’s tennis athletes claimed in a lawsuit that Eastern Michigan was not compliant with Title IX after cutting those sports, and two months ago, a federal judge ordered the school to reinstate both sports by this fall.
Saying goodbye
On the last day of last month, Pitt’s seniors accepted their bouquets after the match against North Carolina. Clara Lucas, Natsumi Okamoto, Rezende and Luisa Varon walked from Court 1 to Court 2, the final athletes to be recognized as Pitt women’s tennis players before fans, friends, family and classmates, a larger throng of onlookers than they were accustomed to.
Their younger teammates sat on a bench nearby, clapping and cheering, hopeful for the future. On the balcony stood David Pfaff, clad in a Pitt sweatshirt, and Mike Dichov, often the team’s only casual fans, a couple of tennis lifers who just enjoy watching the sport at their local fitness club. But they felt an appreciation for getting to see high-level college tennis in-person and loved cheering on the Panthers the past two seasons.
“I’m actually trying to buy all the unused balls they have left to use for our USTA teams,” said Pfaff, a United States Tennis Association veteran who used to find matches five minutes down the road from his Kennedy Township home, but now has to travel 45 minutes four days a week to play his favorite sport.
“I’d love to be able to represent Pitt by using their tennis balls. You can't buy them otherwise because they’re copyrighted for Pitt, so it would be a neat way to kind of carry it on, for a few years at least.”
“I think when you play, you make it work, even if it’s a little hard,” said Pfaff’s friend, Dichov. “If you love tennis and you like Pitt, you can make it work. But I get it. It’s tough.”
Brian Batko: bbatko@post-gazette.com and Twitter @BrianBatko.
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First Published: April 10, 2019, 11:00 a.m.
Updated: April 10, 2019, 1:07 p.m.
