The Cavaliers, who advanced to the NCAA quarterfinals in 2022 are 18-6 and ranked No. 11 as they head into this year’s NCAA tournament. The tournament field will be announced Monday during an online selection show on NCAA.com, starting at 6 p.m.
Due to the pandemic, the NCAA tournament wasn’t held in 2020, but “the last two years have been amazing experiences,” Subhash said.
She’s learned that a team’s health is a critical factor in May. “I think at this point in the season most teams have a lot of players that are kind of banged up,” Subhash said. “Tennis is a really strenuous sport, and injuries, at least small ones, are very common. So focusing on the fitness side of it and recovery, being smart with practice, I think that’s a big thing.”
Also important, Subhash said, is “building your team’s connection and that sense of unity. This year, especially, we’ve seen in our conference that every single team is so strong. So [talent alone] is not what’s gonna set teams apart. It’s more of the connection players have with each other and the trust that your team has. I think what sets the winning team apart from the rest is just that last step of love and connection. So building that, I think, is really important at these stages.”
Subhash spends countless hours at the Boar’s Head Resort, playing and training at the Virginia Tennis Facility, but she’s made sure to take advantage of opportunities available to her on Grounds. Through Madison House’s Athletes Committed to Education (ACE) program, she began volunteering as a tutor in the fall of 2019, working with area elementary school students.
The pandemic halted her in-person tutoring, and so Subhash started looking for “virtual opportunities that were similar,” she said. Through Madison House, she found a program that helped area children who were underprivileged or for whom English was not their first language.
Subhash said she and another UVA student were assigned to a fifth-grader, and “we met with her once a week to help her with her reading and math.”
When she was growing up, Subhash said, “tennis was definitely the biggest part of my life, but I didn’t want it to be the only thing I could fall back on, so I was always very focused on school as well. So that part of it came naturally. I’d always been very interested in volunteering. I didn’t get a chance to do much before college. So when I got here, that was definitely one of the first…