It’s a muggy Tuesday afternoon and the senior staff of the Oregon women’s tennis team has come together for what will be one of the final practices of the school year.
“Come on old man,” coach Nils Schyllander mutters to himself as he sets up to return a volley.
The shot comes, fast and hard. The big, stocky Swede parries it, grunting. It hits the tape of the net and bounces back. Schyllander throws his hands up in frustration.
“Who are you today?” he demands of his opponent, a tall, lithe brunette who has just bested her coach with a sizzling volley.
“I’m still myself Nils,” giggles Dominika Dieskova, as she exchanges a look of amusement with the tennis-racket-armed brunette by her side.
Enjoying the exchange between Schyllander and his team captain, graduate assistant coach Monica Poveda laughs. She remembers the days when she did for Tulsa what 37th-ranked Dieskova is doing for Oregon.
While playing for the Golden Hurricane from 1997 to 2001, Poveda had an illustrious collegiate career.
“I struggled a little bit my freshman year because I had to adjust my clay court game to the hard court,” Poveda, 27, said. “But my senior year, when I was captain of the team, as a team we reached the highest ever national rank for Tulsa. And that has not been broken yet.”
Poveda said Tulsa peaked at No. 21 during her senior year, and the team ended up finishing the season ranked in the mid-20s.
Poveda finished her collegiate career as the Western Athletic Conference Player of the Year. She is also, arguably, one of the best players to ever come out of Bolivia.
Poveda holds virtually every Bolivian record in the history of the highly-lauded Federation Cup tournament. She has the most total wins (29), singles wins (17), the second most total doubles wins (12) and the most years played (7).
But after wrapping up her career at Tulsa a high note, Poveda postponed her return to Bolivia to make the jump from the collegiate ranks to the professional circuit.
For a year she lived the nomadic life of the rookie tennis pro, traveling and training alone, worrying about piddling rankings that barely factored into the major scale, and playing in a multitude of random tournaments- all with the sole intention of developing her game and making enough money to continue her career.
Poveda began with a 1,075 world ranking and spent a full year on the pro circuit. By the time she had to cut her career short due to a lack of funds, she’d worked her way up to No. 850 in singles, and around 450 in doubles. Today, Poveda thinks that if she’d had more money and more time, she could have made it.
“I definitely needed about three years to just feel comfortable in the new environment and develop,” Poveda said. “For most of the girls, you develop in the first year, you kinda throw yourself out there, play. See what it’s like.
“Then the second year, you start looking into more strategy, how you’re going to increase your points.”
Poveda found a coach who was willing to help her develop her game. But Patricio Apey (former coach of Argentinean tennis legend Gabriela Sabatini) told her that she’d need about $35,000 to “do it right.”
Poveda’s father, a diabetic, had paid for her first year on the tour. However, he eventually told her that he could no longer afford to support her in addition to paying for his own medical bills and for the education of Poveda’s brother and sister.
“It was not impossible. It was possible, but I didn’t want to take the risk of my family,” Poveda said. “In case my father needed money for medical emergencies. I would not jeopardize the life of my father because of my dream.”
Poveda returned to Bolivia, where for the next couple of years she worked a regular job and gave private tennis lessons in her free time. But she soon started looking for an assistant coaching position with college teams in the United States.
“I wanted to coach and to do my M.B.A.,” Poveda said. “And I knew that coaching at the college level was good enough to maintain my motivation to coach. I like the challenge of the position. It’s hard for me to just coach for fun.”
Everything came together when she heard through Monica Hoz de Vila, a freshman on the Oregon tennis team at the time, that Schyllander was looking for a new assistant coach.
Now, Poveda is back in the college game. And she said all her life experience and playing experience up to this point have contributed to help her excel as the assistant coach and resident mom of the Oregon women’s tennis team.
For a team with a distinctly international flavor -five out of the seven players on the roster this year were born outside the U.S. – it helps that Poveda herself is a foreign import.
“It helps us understand what (the foreign-born players) are going through when they’re starting out,” said Poveda, pointing out that Schyllander himself is also an international player. The head coach hails from Sweden and played his collegiate tennis at Northern Arizona.
The many years that Poveda has spent playing both in college and in the pros have also helped her as a coach.
“It’s instant credibility,” Schyllander said. “She’s been there, done that and the girls can draw from that. You know when she gives advice that she’s gone through that. It’s not just talk. It’s something she’s lived.”
Poveda now tries to use her own experiences to understand issues from her players’ points of view.
“One thing I’ve definitely learned over the last year and a half is to diversify based on the needs of the players,” Poveda said. “For instance, in a match, some players need more smooth talk or more hard talk to pump them up, but many times there are players that don’t need that. I’m better able to adjust because of my own experiences.”
Dieskova believes that one of Poveda’s greatest assets is her ability to quickly size up opposing players and help the Ducks figure out how to out-play them.”She is very good at analyzing players. She sees very well the opponents’ weakness and strengths because she’s played on a very high level,” Dieskova said.
Poveda has also taken on a role that Schyllander would never be able to fulfill. Eight years spent leading a women’s team has heightened Schyllander’s sensitivity to the needs of the women under his charge to the point where he can instantly tell when a woman has gotten a haircut. (“I’m a women’s coach; I notice these things,” he said, grinning.)
But as both Poveda and Schyllander admit, having a woman on the coaching staff definitely helps.
“There are things that you just don’t go to men and tell them,” Poveda said. “Even with your parents. I won’t go to my dad with some things. I’ll just talk to mom about it, you know?”