STARKVILLE — Matt Walters doesn’t spend much time in the United States in the offseason, but he doesn’t complain. It’s just part of the life of a college tennis recruiter.
As assistant men’s tennis coach at Mississippi State, Walters will spend close to two months overseas this summer as part of the new norm in college tennis: recruiting international players.
MSU coach Matt Roberts said coaches need to spend so much time overseas because of the competitive nature of the Southeastern Conference and a relatively shallow talent pool in the United States, where he said a drop-off exists after the top 20 or 30 players.
To make matters more difficult, many of the top players opt to stay in the programs closer to home.
“We’re not going to get them in out backyard. We’re not even going to get them in this country,” he said.
No. 18 MSU’s roster of eight players from eight countries will return to action at 5 p.m. Thursday when it takes on the winner of the match between Alabama and Vanderbilt at the SEC Championship in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Simon Baudry (France), Nuno Borges (Portugal), Niclas Braun (Germany), Mate Cutura (Herzegovina), Trevor Foshey (United States — Florida), Vaughn Hunter (South Africa), Giovanni Oradini (Italy), and Strahinja Rakic (Serbia) make up a team that has compiled a 17-7 record (8-4 in the SEC). MSU, which has been ranked as high as No. 14 in the Intercollegiate Tennis Association poll, will try to improve its resume for consideration for a bid to the NCAA tournament, which begins May 12.
MSU isn’t the only league school to be recruiting overseas. Of the 125 men’s tennis players on the 13 SEC rosters (Missouri has a wrestling program), 62 aren’t American, which is just shy of 50 percent. The concentration of foreign players in SEC women’s tennis is slightly less, 44 percent (57 of 128), but it is still significant.
Florida and Georgia are the exceptions in the SEC. Florida has two international players on its 11-man roster, while Georgia has three on its 10-player roster. Roberts said those programs benefit from top players opting to stay closer to home.
While Roberts plans to continue to recruit international players, the current roster was constructed when that didn’t necessarily allow for such planning.
In the offseason after Roberts’ first year as MSU’s head coach (he was promoted from his assistant coach role in the summer of 2014), graduation and transfers cut the roster from seven to two. Recruiting to fill the roster netted a class that included Nuno Borges, one of the top five players in the ITA rankings.
Walters has measures in place to keep such a frenzy from repeating itself: a vast network of European players, coaches, and others to keep tabs on players so he will know who to target.
That’s how MSU discovered freshman Niclas Braun. He said MSU was at a German national championships event recruiting players in the Under-18 tournament, but he saw him in the Under-14 tournament and kept up with him until it was time to recruit him.
Early evaluations will be part of Walters’ first summer tour of Europe, which will begin after Borges’ run in the NCAA tournament. He’ll start at the French Open in Paris to see prospects in the main draw and in the qualifiers before an in-home visit and a few more days in Spain. Then he’ll spend nearly a week with Oradini in Italy before spending a week with Braun in Germany.
After that, Walters has a week of unscheduled Europe time to travel to see a few more players before he is scheduled to return home to prepare for another trip in August.
“I’m always on my phone messaging guys. As we’re talking, my phone is going off. I’ve Skyped with guys in Australia at 3 a.m.,” Walters said. “I dig. I look through every tournament. I actually found a guy we’re talking to now that’s under the radar that we found from looking at tournament two years ago. I was just up at midnight, scrambling, and searching and messaged him. He doesn’t know anything about college, but he’s interested.”
Roberts likes having players from different countries on the roster. He said having players from so many countries prevents them from speaking their native languages among one another and keeps their prior experience together from impacting how they work at MSU to create a new culture.
“It’s unreal. It’s like we have all of Europe in there,” Braun said. “You see how everyone is bringing a little bit of culture to this locker room from his own country. I’ve never been around such an awesome team.”
Follow Dispatch sports writer Brett Hudson on Twitter, @Brett_Hudson
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