AIDAN POLLARD
Sports Editor
Fredonia Athletics is growing. And with that comes a little bit of hurt.
Alongside the renovation of facilities, developing drug testing policies and increased academic expectations of athletes, Fredonia’s athletics department has gone through a number of coaching changes.
Since last Fall, the track and field teams have lost a throwing coach, the lacrosse team has changed coaches and most recently, the swim team has changed coaches from Arthur Wang to interim coach Geoff Braun, who also serves as the volleyball coach.
A little over one year into Jerry Fisk’s role as Fredonia director of athletics, the women’s tennis team is seeing what is hopefully the beginning of the end of Fredonia Athletics’ growing pains.
The tennis team saw a change in staff after last fall when the head coaching job changed hands from Greg Catalano to Matt Johnson, and the job could potentially change hands again.
“At the Chautauqua Tennis Center in the end of October,” said Fredonia tennis player Sarah Bunk after being asked when the last time she spoke to her head coach was.
“Oh, that was Halloween weekend. I didn’t go to that,” responded Bunk’s teammate Taylor Marelli. “So I haven’t talked to [Johnson] probably since our last match.”
“Matt [Johnson] came to us probably about a month ago,” said Fisk. “And said ‘I’m going to try my hand [at] teaching pro in Rochester.”
Fisk went on to explain that Johnson came to Fredonia recently to drop things off.
“We had such a good season and the girls enjoyed him so much last year that . . . I don’t want to move in a different direction if that doesn’t work out.”
Tennis, being a fall sport, doesn’t have much going on in the way of practicing during the Spring semester.
During the off-season, the tennis team has been doing strength and conditioning practices with Fredonia’s strength and conditioning coach Jon-Ryan Maloney.
But even if actual tennis practices aren’t necessary during the off-season, recruiting remains a big factor in any athletics program.
There is currently one committed recruit in the incoming class.
“I do remember that Matt [Johnson] went to a recruiting day in Lakewood,” said Bunk. “I’m not sure if that’s where he found this girl, but I do know he tried to recruit and we do have one committed player next season.”
“There’s five officially coming back as far as I know. Which means that we have to get our friends to join,” said Bunk. “[We need] at least six.”
“Six is the bare minimum,” added Marelli. “’Cause that leaves no wiggle room if someone does get hurt or can’t get out of class.”
In order to have a full roster in tennis six players are necessary, but a team can still score and win with a minimum of four if they forfeit certain matches.
“I’ve been at other schools where we had small roster sizes,” said Fisk. “They’d have to forfeit third doubles and sixth singles if we hypothetically only had five and couldn’t add anybody else. I certainly hope we’re not in that spot but I think you can go with four and not have to forfeit because at that point you can win four singles and two doubles which is enough to win a match.”
Even though the tennis team should be able to score no matter what next season, the situation is less than ideal.
“One of the things we’ve worked hard on is the new recruiting brochure,” said Fisk. “I think it’s pretty special and it’s not like anything we’ve done before. This is like [an NCAA] Division I sort of model.”
The brochure, which was a tri-fold folder filled with information about Fredonia’s athletics and campus, featured the Blue Devils’ logo, a map and a letter written by Fisk.
“I think it’s a pretty impressive document that we can send out to a potential student-athlete,” said Fisk. “I think we’re going to bring in student-athletes that want to invest in themselves.”
Tennis, as well as many other sports, are going through tough transitional periods that raises questions of where the department expects to go after the transitions are over, and whether or not these growing pains are worth it.
However, Fisk is aware of these problems and has a vision for the department’s future.
“I think we’re on our way there,” said Fisk. “There’s a few words I use: ‘Intentionality,’ ‘accountability’ and ‘sustainability.’ And I think that we’re being very intentional about the expectations. The study hall hours, getting the drug testing in. Now, are we doing those things to be punitive? We’re not. But we’re protecting people’s health, we’re helping them. There are a lot of majors on campus that you can’t graduate [from] unless you have a certain GPA. Well you could still be eligible as a student-athlete without any additional work and never graduate because you couldn’t get your degree in your major.”
“Well, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” said Fisk. “So I think part of the process was getting all of the coaches on the [same] page . . . And [letting them know] that I was going to work just as hard as they were.”
“I think one of the first conversations [The Leader and I] ever had was ‘Fredonia is known as a party school, do we think it’ll ever not be known as a party school?’ It might have been the first question [The Leader] actually ever asked me,” said Fisk.
“. . . I think once we work through some of these things and the incoming student-athletes see how serious we are with the Performance Center, the study hall hours, the drug-testing, [the subject of ] this, the officialness and sort of intentionality [with which] we do some of the things we do, the way we do the gala is different than it used to be, and all those things . . . I think new incoming student-athletes are going to see things that are different than [a current athlete] saw when [they] came for [their] visit.”