University of North Texas Athletics
Green Gang: Tennis Rebuilding Project Complete
4/26/2010 12:00:00 AM | Return to Play
By Steven Bartolotta, April 26, 2010, 8:44 a.m.
Time to play one of my favorite characters of all time, Carnac the Magnificent on the Tonight Show (as played by Johnny Carson). Here we go..... The Corvair, JaMarcus Russell playing quarterback, and Tom Hicks owning a sports franchise?.... Name three things worse than North Texas tennis when Sujay Lama arrived in Denton.
That's how bad it was when Lama too over the program in 2006 and just how remarkable it is that this program just captured the Sun Belt title.
The program was an afterthought. It had never won, it would never win. The lifeless program needed a spark, energy, a vision.
Lama for his part was coming in as a coach that had resigned from Illinois and needed a fresh start.
The match was perfect. Lama is an energetic, fun-loving coach that said from day one winning the conference title and storming onto the national scene wasn't just a pipe-dream, it was going to happen. He said it every single day.
I scoffed. Not that I didn't think he could do it, just not here. His first year was a disaster, he had to turn the roster over and by the end of it he had walk-on's. Lama still preached how he was going to turn this thing around and win....big.
Slowly the recruits he talked about getting started arriving on campus. Last season his program won 17 matches. And this year his program achieved the unthinkable earlier in the year and became nationally ranked.
His players started buying in. After a few early season stumbles, the Mean Green started believing. No more talk of potential, this team believed as much as their coach did. All that was left was a title.
FIU was the giant, a top-50 program that walloped North Texas earlier in the year. Up 3-0 at the start of the title match, it was all but over. But like the persona of their coach, the girls rallied and at the climax, Catalina Cruz, one of Lama's first recruits, won the school's first ever Sun Belt tennis conference title and only the second ever.
No one ever thought this was possible except Lama when he was hired. And now he has North Texas tennis officially on the map nationally, and now everyone believes him.
