Great Sports Moments: A Perfect Season

The 2003 Illinois men’s tennis team finished 32-0 and won the program’s first national championship. (Image by Tom Schaefges/U. of I. Athletics)

Northern schools—Illinois fits that category—are not supposed to be good at tennis. Climate is the biggest issue: It’s hard to practice your serve and volley with a foot of snow on the ground. And because of said weather conditions, most top prospects won’t even consider signing. Instead, they pick schools in the South and West, where they can play year-round.

But the 2003 Illinois men’s team ignored those obstacles and pulled off a miracle.

Not only did Coach Craig Tiley’s team win—it never lost. A perfect 32-0 season closed with a victory against Vanderbilt for the NCAA title: the first by a northern school in 40 years.

It gets better. In the individual tournaments, Illinois swept the singles (Amer Delic, ’10 AHS) and the doubles (Rajeev Ram and Brian Wilson).

Twenty-three years later, Tiley recognizes the special qualities of the 2003 team. “More than anything, no miracle happens overnight,” says Tiley, now CEO of the U.S. Tennis Association. “You have to consistently put the building blocks in place.”

When Tiley took over in the early 1990s, there seemed to be little hope for the program. The team had gone 4-23 overall and 0-10 in the Big Ten in 1992-93. Then-Illinois athletic director Ron Guenther, ’67 AHS, MS ’68 AHS, who brought Tiley to the Atkins Tennis Center as head of instruction, asked him to serve as interim coach. That later turned into a permanent gig.

Tiley, who had never coached college tennis, set standards for his program and predicted that, by 2005, Illinois would be the national champion.

“I made a commitment on a few things. No. 1, we’ll focus recruiting on American players and make sure that every year we have a local player on the team,” Tiley says. “No. 2, I was going to develop the program as a breeding ground for a future in professional tennis. The third thing was everything was going to be done as a team. Even though tennis is an individual sport, we would flip the thinking, and it was always going to be done as a team. Those three things were always in the back of my mind as our key strategic pillars. They worked.”

The win total began to climb: 13, 17, 18, 21. Then, in 2002, Illinois reached the NCAA quarterfinals, setting up what was to come.

The 2003 team was dominant during the fall season and continued into the new year, outdueling Florida for Illinois’ first national indoor title and rolling through the NCAA tournament, culminating in the team’s victory over Vanderbilt in the finals.

Just as Tiley had predicted a decade earlier, he had led Illinois to a national championship, with a team comprised largely of American players.

A sport dominated by teams from the South and West finally had a northern champion.