20 year old Tatsiana Uvarova retires and decides to go to Uni in the States [Archive]

spiceboy

Apr 12th, 2006, 06:24 PM

You can read more about college tennis and some (sad) news on former US hope Tanner Cochran in this interesting article...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/sports/tennis/11tennis.html

Foreign Pros in College Tennis: On Top and Under Scrutiny

By JOE DRAPE (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/joe_drape/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
</NYT_BYLINE>Published: April 11, 2006

<NYT_TEXT>It is a photograph that Benedikt Dorsch, the winner of the N.C.A.A. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_collegiate_athletic_assn/index.html?inline=nyt-org) men's singles tennis title last spring, wishes he could take back. In one hand, Dorsch holds a trophy; in the other, he holds an oversized check, both for winning a professional tournament in Germany five years ago.

"It was not a good idea to hold the prize money up in the air," he said recently.
National Collegiate Athletic Association rules say athletes who have accepted prize money beyond their expenses in any tournament or who have played for a professional team in a sport cannot compete collegiately in that sport. But many such tennis players from other countries do anyway — so many that dozens of college coaches over the past 12 years have complained to the N.C.A.A. about scores of athletes who they contend are professionals.

The coaches have had little success. Although the N.C.A.A. has long proclaimed amateurism as a "bedrock principle," it has declared only three of these international athletes ineligible since 2003, and it has granted exemptions in case after case. Some colleges, emboldened because the N.C.A.A. leaves it to them to police their athletes, have interpreted the principle of amateurism loosely.

The result, these coaches say, is that many international players competing in college are failed professionals.

They say such players are older and more experienced than college players from the United States and it is unfair that they are being given scholarships at the expense of true amateurs.

The coaches also express frustration with the N.C.A.A., which they say is overwhelmed with trying to enforce the rules in big-money sports like football and basketball while a win-at-all-costs mentality seeps into low-revenue sports like theirs.

Last year, in the N.C.A.A. individual championship tournament, international players filled 38 of the 64 men's slots and 33 of the 64 women's berths. Many of those players had no professional experience, but as many as half did, according to 10 coaches interviewed by The New York Times.

"No one is anti-international," Geoff Macdonald, Vanderbilt's women's coach, said. "We're antiprofessional."

Over all, 28 percent of the players on Division I men's tennis teams from 1999 to 2004 were international, as were 21 percent of those on women's teams, according to the N.C.A.A. With about a month to go before this season's championships, international players held 6 of the top 10 spots in the men's and women's rankings last week.

"It's a great deal to come to America and get your school paid for and play tennis," said Sheila McInerney, the women's tennis coach at Arizona State and the co-chair of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association's ethics and infractions committee.

"They're good students and good kids," she said of players who have come to the United States for college scholarships after competing as professionals. "But I don't think it's fair for my 18- or 19-year-old from San Diego, who's been playing junior tennis, to go out there and get beat by her. And you're going to get beat by her every time."

Confusing Standards

Even coaches who have signed players suspected of playing as professionals acknowledge it has become difficult to determine who should be allowed to play and who shouldn't.

"It's hard to say who is an amateur or pro now," said Paul Kostin, the coach at Virginia Commonwealth, whose team includes Tatsiana Uvarova, 20, a sophomore from Belarus who won $39,000 in WTA Tour events last year, according to the Tour. "Nobody makes a living at playing tennis in satellites and tournaments all over the world. You don't want to stop them because of some Mickey Mouse tournaments. They're all losers in the sense that they weren't good enough to be pro."

Coaches who recruit international players argue that they need to expand their recruiting base to compete and that they are following the N.C.A.A.'s guidelines.

"The world is getting smaller, and we've historically had a difficult time attracting the top American players to Waco, Tex., and this small private university," said Matt Knoll, the coach of the Baylor men's team, which was ranked No. 5 in the nation. "We want to be competitive, and our team goal is to win championships, so we've gone to where we can get players."

Knoll's formula has worked. Seven of his eight players are from abroad; Baylor won the 2004 N.C.A.A. title and was the runner-up last year. Seven of the nine players on Baylor's women's team, which was ranked No. 8, are from outside the United States.

Dorsch, a German, won 36 of 38 matches for Baylor last year before winning the N.C.A.A. tournament at age 24. Dorsch said he believed the photograph of him holding the check was taken in Hahnbach, Germany, in 2001 and that his prize money was less than $1,000. The photograph was not distributed by the news media.

He said that in some tournaments, his prize money exceeded his expenses, which meant he was a professional ineligible for college competition according to the N.C.A.A.'s rules. Baylor admitted him on the condition that he pay $5,500 to charity, which he said he did, and the N.C.A.A. did not take any action.

"You ask someone at 16 what you're going to do in five years, and you say, 'I want to be a professional tennis player,' " said Dorsch, who is now playing professionally on the ATP and is ranked No. 242. "I didn't know what the N.C.A.A. was. Sure, I won some money. But over all, I lost more money chasing my goal. It's not like I was Boris Becker (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/boris_becker/index.html?inline=nyt-per) or was on the ATP Tour or anything."

Knoll said lawyers hired by the university had vetted his players for compliance and represented them in N.C.A.A. matters. In 2003, Knoll withheld Benjamin Becker — who won the 2004 N.C.A.A. singles title — from a match as a precaution because of his participation on a club team in a German league. A Baylor women's player, Carolin Walter, who has since transferred to Florida State, sat out more than 10 matches as a penalty for playing in a forbidden league, Knoll said.

Women playing for Arkansas, Nebraska, Pepperdine and South Carolina also played on German club teams that the N.C.A.A. later determined were professional because they paid their players.

Another Baylor athlete with a wealth of international professional experience, Zuzana Zemenova of Slovakia, won last year's N.C.A.A. women's singles championship as a 20-year-old freshman and is ranked fourth in the nation this season.

Joey Scrivano, the Baylor women's tennis coach, did not allow Zemenova to speak with a reporter for The Times. "But she knows the rules — all our kids do, and have followed them," Scrivano said.

Uvarova, the Virginia Commonwealth player, won a $25,000 tournament in Italy last summer and reached the semifinals of a $50,000 event by beating Maret Ani, who is currently ranked 67th on the WTA Tour.

Coach Kostin said Uvarova had played under the umbrella of the Belarus Tennis Federation and "didn't make a dime."

McInerney of Arizona State and other coaches also cited Caroline Basu, a 22-year-old German, as a player who fit their profile of a professional. As a junior player, Basu beat Kim Clijsters (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/kim_clijsters/index.html?inline=nyt-per) of Belgium — now the WTA's second-ranked player — and later played nearly 100 tournaments professionally in Europe. The WTA lists Basu's winnings as about $25,000.

Basu provided the University of Georgia with receipts and a detailed accounting of her travels showing that she had lost more money than she won traveling from Mexico to Liechtenstein to the Republic of Georgia.

"We went through the process, and the N.C.A.A. approved it," said Georgia Coach Jeff Wallace, who would not make Basu available for an interview.

Last year, she played on the No. 1 college doubles team and was named an all-American.

Tougher for Americans

In the United States, student-athletes can compete in a professional tennis tournament only by declaring their amateur status on the entry form. Then, no matter how far they advance, they receive only expense money, dispensed from the United States Tennis Association's amateur pool. But in the rest of the world, such a declaration is not recognized.

"We assume you are professional if you're playing with us," said Jackie Nesbitt, the head of professional circuits for the International Tennis Federation, which conducts tournaments in about 70 countries, including the United States.

Tanner Cochran, 21, was an American tennis player whose father, Guy, argued that she was a victim of a double standard.

Cochran played in as many WTA events as Uvarova, some of them as an amateur. She eventually turned professional but could prove that her winnings — about $57,000 — did not exceed her expenses. She did not sign with an agent or accept endorsement money, actions forbidden by N.C.A.A. rules.

But last spring, the N.C.A.A. denied her reinstatement, saying she had played about 60 tournaments, and most important had declared herself a professional on several entries.

"The bitter pill for me is that my kid, who chased the dream and did everything right and was honest on all the paperwork, was told no," Guy Cochran said of his daughter, who is a student manager for the University of Mississippi men's team. "As an American taxpayer, it seems we're educating a lot of foreign kids who chased the dream, too, and didn't have it work out, but they're getting the benefit of the doubt."

Rodney Harmon, the director for men's tennis for the U.S.T.A., said some coaches and international players had circumvented the rules at the expense of American students and the development of the sport in the United States.

"For a lot of coaches, it's don't ask, don't tell," he said.

The international federations and leagues "don't know or care about our amateur rules," he said, adding: "They are going to stonewall or tell the N.C.A.A. what they want to hear because they don't want to alienate their players by keeping them from the opportunity to go to school. It should be the same for everybody, but right now it is not."

Whose Job Is It?

N.C.A.A. officials said the colleges were responsible for complying with amateurism rules. "We're only as good as the information we get from our members," said William Saum, who is in charge of monitoring agent, gambling and amateurism activities for the N.C.A.A.

Coaches, however, say they have presented credible information since 1994 and that the N.C.A.A. neither investigates in a timely and thorough fashion nor metes out significant penalties. In the past three years, the N.C.A.A. has ruled on the eligibility of 30 foreign tennis players. Three were barred from competition; some of the 27 ruled eligible were asked to sit out matches.

These penalties are so lenient, coaches say, that they do not deter teams from taking chances on international players, even those with extensive professional résumés.

"It's fair to say the N.C.A.A. has been far from proactive, and the reason is because we are not football or basketball, one of their moneymakers," said David A. Benjamin, the executive director of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association, which serves as a governing body and represents about 1,500 coaches. "We've repeatedly let them know that this is a priority."

Jennifer Strawley, the director of the N.C.A.A. department that decides eligibility cases, said her staff was not an investigative body. Rather, it acts when a college seeks guidance or sometimes when other institutions complain.

"Our membership doesn't want a simple rule that says if you violate this, you are banned permanently," Strawley said. "We evaluate on a case-by-case basis."

But tennis coaches say that the N.C.A.A. bars athletes who have played professionally in other sports. "They don't let C.B.A. players return to college and play basketball or Double-A players come back to compete in school," said Tony Minnis, the women's coach at Louisiana State, referring to the Continental Basketball Association and minor league baseball.

Lack of Faith in the N.C.A.A.

Deana Garner, a lawyer for the N.C.A.A., opened an inquiry in the spring of 2003 and traveled to Germany in the summer of 2004. Later that fall, the N.C.A.A. concluded that two of the suspect German leagues were indeed professional and violated N.C.A.A. eligibility rules.

"It was information that they had been told for decades and already knew," Macdonald, the women's tennis coach at Vanderbilt, said. "That many of these players were ringers. They were older, had tons of experience, had taken money or, at the very least, played on teams where money changed hands."

Rainer Kringe, a club team official in Wiesbaden, Germany, said players down to the sixth division were paid.

"Nobody plays for free," Kringe said.

The N.C.A.A. stopped short of barring all European club tennis, however. It said that it hoped by next year to have its clearinghouse determine whether any athlete had broken its rules regarding amateurism.

"We're trying to level the playing field so every school can have the same information about each student-athlete," Saum, of the N.C.A.A., said.

But many coaches say offering an online questionnaire about prize money and pro leagues, as the N.C.A.A. plans, will only make it easier to circumvent the rules because colleges will not do their own investigations.

The coaches also lack faith in the N.C.A.A. clearinghouse, whose weaknesses have been exposed in other sports. Most recently, it granted eligibility to teenage football players who earned easy grades at unaccredited correspondence schools, and to athletes at prep schools built around basketball. Macdonald said any system was useless unless those who abused it were caught and punished.

"The worst charge the N.C.A.A. can level on a school is 'lack of institutional control,' " he said. "Where is their institutional control? They've ignored this situation for more than a decade hoping it would go away. But it's not going to go away because they have formed a committee or created a new apparatus. What's the point of having rules if you don't enforce them?"

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