As lifelong friends who won three high school state titles together in Memphis, Zach Dailey and Lewis Smith understood each other as well as doubles partners can by the time they got to Vanderbilt. They understood each other’s strengths: Smith always had the bigger serve, but he often took a few games to settle down in a match. So if they won a pre-match coin toss, Dailey served first. The 2003 NCAA championship match against unbeaten Illinois was no different. Except, with the imposing stands at the University of Georgia looming over them, television cameras following them and history potentially on their rackets, everything was different.
Dailey stepped up to serve. And promptly double faulted three times in a row.
“I was a ball of nerves,” Dailey recalled. “I’ve never been so nervous in my life.”
The Vanderbilt duo dropped four of the first five games. During a changeover, initial nerves under control, Smith challenged his partner in no uncertain terms, “like a best friend would do,” Dailey chuckled. They cleaned up the mistakes and rallied to win their match, part of a Vanderbilt effort that settled for second place only after the Commodores pushed an opponent regarded as one of the best of all time to the final set of the final singles match.
Twenty years ago, the Vanderbilt men’s tennis team dared to go well beyond its comfort zone. In doing so, those student-athletes not only won the first SEC Championship title in team history but nearly went where no Vanderbilt team ever had. Three years before bowling’s first national title, and more than a decade before the VandyBoys and women’s tennis added to the trophy haul, the men’s tennis team played for Vanderbilt’s first team national championship. (Two years earlier, current Vanderbilt women’s tennis head coach Aleke Tsoubanos and her teammates also played for a title.)
The 20-year anniversary of that memorable run marks more than the story of a team that came tantalizingly close to making history. It offers an opportunity to revisit a story about how far it’s possible to come. From last place in the SEC just a year earlier, head coach Ken Flach and largely the same student-athletes proved that college tennis, unlike its professional counterpart, is the ultimate team game. As Scott Brown, one of their own, returns to Vanderbilt as men’s tennis head coach, history offers a blueprint for the future.
“That season and my entire…