That Fernanda Contreras had the potential to go places in tennis—including the grass lawns of Wimbledon—was apparent to any of the college coaches who recruited her. But former Vanderbilt women’s tennis coach Geoff Macdonald might have been the only one likely to guess that one of the program’s all-time greats would go on to become a novelist.
When Contreras arrived in Nashville on a 2014 recruiting trip, Macdonald texted to let her know he was stuck in traffic and would be a few minutes late getting to the airport. Perhaps he worried he would arrive to find his star recruit waiting, bored and impatient. Instead, he had to honk the car horn to get her attention in the pick-up area. Apologetically, she explained she was so engrossed in John Green’s A Fault in Our Stars that she hadn’t noticed him pull up.
Contreras would go on to graduate as Vanderbilt’s all-time leader in singles wins, as well as the single-season record holder in the same. An All-American and a three-time All-SEC selection, she helped the Commodores reach the national championship match in 2018. But Macdonald told her some years later that it was the encounter at the airport that convinced him she would be the ideal Commodore. Anyone who loved books that much, and also happened to be one of the best in her age group to wield a racket, was born to play at Vanderbilt.
“We just had a very tennis and literary education with him,” Contreras said, recalling moments such as visiting William Faulkner’s home on a tennis road trip to Ole Miss. “Maybe sometimes coaches feel they should focus more on tennis than books. But Coach was the opposite. He would always encourage us to bring books and read, take us to libraries and engage us in conversations about what we were reading. I really appreciated that.”
It’s why, without checking the entire canon of literature, Macdonald is likely the only SEC tennis coach to appear in a novel about globetrotting Greek gods. A character named after him enjoys a cameo in Rise of the Darkness, the debut novel Contreras penned under the name FC Gomez. Published in November, the fast-moving, mythology-rich adventure is set in the present and follows a teenage student and museum intern named Leo who helps Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom and war, battle a malevolent force threatening the fabric of the universe.
Their quest is hardly less of a page-turner than the author’s journey to publishing her first book.
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