In the modern world, college tennis struggles for the spotlight despite being loaded with some of the best athletes from around the world, especially at athletically thriving SEC schools like Kentucky.
In fact, the University of Kentucky is one of the premier college tennis programs in the country and the way head coach Cedric Kauffmann has built his teams over the years partly demonstrates the nuances of college tennis recruiting.
When looking at what makes Kauffmann such a talented recruiter for UK, all signs first point to the fact that he has also been through the process as a player at the university.
Kauffmann was once recruited to play at Kentucky, too. Years ago, he was a member of the 1995-98 teams and finished with a career record of 121-61.
Interestingly, he grew up in Florida and did not have his heart set on Lexington when picking a school.
“I wanted to go to Florida, South Carolina, Texas, California, kind of the belt near the water,” he said.
Unfortunately for him, Kauffmann was told he wasn’t good enough to play for any of those places, Despite that, he caught the eye of former Kentucky coach Dennis Emery, who wasn’t even in town to see him.
“He was recruiting somebody else and saw that I was very good and he offered me, so I visited Kentucky,” Kauffmann said.
The teammate Emery had originally been in town to scout, Marcus Fluitt, also attended Kentucky on a tennis scholarship.
Emery’s decision turned out great for UK as Kauffmann would become one of the most dominant players Kentucky tennis has ever seen, becoming the first player inducted into the UK Athletics Hall of Fame.
No matter the success, in tennis, recruiting is lower key than the sports with national signings that are seen on television. Instead, it’s a much smaller scene where the biggest matches get just a few hundred spectators and important signings don’t make headlines.
Now that Kauffmann is at the helm of his alma mater, he spends a lot of his time finding the proper fits for his team, including a 19-year-old tennis sensation living over 8,200 miles away from his hometown of Auckland, New Zealand.
Said Kiwi, Jack Loutit, has created a name for himself as the No. 1 player in New Zealand, yet the developing athlete has chosen to forgo other opportunities for a career at Kentucky.
“I’d say that tennis community in New Zealand is a lot smaller than America, which is kind of the reason I did want to come to college in America,” Loutit said.
While a player of his age and talent could have a few different career paths, play amateur events and even try to turn pro at an early age, he opted to attend college and develop his game while getting an education.
For Louttit, his path to Kentucky began with his parents encouraging him to choose attending college as a pathway to both a professional tennis career as well as one off the court.
Sure, his preferred path in life is obviously tennis, but the idea of graduating from university is also a safeguard for the young athlete.
“At least I come out of college with a degree, you know?” Loutit said. “Almost as a backup plan for if I have to end my career early or something like that.”
Receiving scholarship offers for athletes in sports like tennis also looks different than an athlete who plays the money maker sports of football or basketball. There just aren’t many cases of coaches traveling to watch high school matches as most of the top talent is international.
In fact, Kentucky connected with Loutit for the first time at the 2021 Orange Bowl, one of the biggest junior tennis tournaments in the U.S., which is why Loutit made the trip to Plantation, Florida.
It was at this tournament that current Kentucky associate head coach Matthew Gordon first saw the talents of Loutit. With that said, it wasn’t just Loutit’s play on the court that caught the attention of Gordon, it was his heart.
The heart Loutit demonstrated in match after match at the Orange Bowl and the passion he had flowing through his body with every beat of the heart played a major role in Gordon putting energy into the Kiwi.
Now at Kentucky, Loutit put his heart on display in front of the largest crowd the Hilary. J Boone Tennis Complex saw all year with the regular season SEC title on the line. After dropping his first set, Loutit fought back to clinch the 4-3 win for the Wildcats in a three-set thriller.
“He showed it just there, he had the biggest heart,” coach Gordon said of the clinching match.
Having seen that heart and potential months before, it led Gordon to track Loutit down after his Orange Bowl matches and speak to him about what a great fit he could be for UK.
Just a month later, Loutit decided to spend one of his visits on the University of Kentucky, which he didn’t do lightly as recruits are allowed just five Division-I visits in high school for the sport of tennis.
“I really liked the coaches the most at Kentucky, which is kind of why I decided to come here in the end,” Loutit said. “They put the player first in all situations. They really do want every single person on the team to succeed and become the best person they can be and I just felt that’s what I want to surround myself with for four years,” he said.
With players like Loutit, the UK coaching staff has built rosters that have made Kentucky a powerhouse over the last three seasons, being consistently ranked in the Intercollegiate Tennis Association top 10 and a premier destination for college tennis up and comers.
Over the last few years, Kentucky has made a run to the National Championship and won an SEC Regular Season and Tournament Championships.
“If it’s a player that’s looking to maybe go professional after school and be on a team that’s top 10, we’re a program (where) some of the best players in the world are starting to look at a lot more,” Kauffmann said.
When approaching recruiting, Kauffmann starts by recruiting the best players first in state, then in country and then around the world. Because Kentucky plays such a high level of tennis, the popular recruiting services do not factor into the equation for Kauffmann.
“Our pool of players that we recruit is so small,” Kauffmann said. “We know there’s only 150 players that are in our pool and we focus on those 150.”
Those 150 players are made up of the top 50 ranked players inside the U.S. and the top 100 ranked players internationally. It’s not common for Kauffmann and his staff to reach out to players outside the top 150.
Because of this, most of the players in the pool that Kentucky searches are not from the United States.
“It’s become international, we travel everywhere, you know? I’ve been to Japan… we go to those events (junior grand slams) and recruit at (the) US Open, at the French Open,” Kauffmann said.
After evaluating talent, the most important thing for Kauffmann and his staff is character and work ethic. Simply put, between two-a-day practices, conditioning and two matches a week, playing tennis at Kentucky requires hard work.
Loutit, to his credit, said he was more than up for the challenge that comes with being a Kentucky tennis player. To him, the more work he has been putting in, the more Kentucky has felt like home.
“We’re traveling Thursday through Monday almost every single week, so it’s definitely full on, but it does feel like a second home to me now, for sure,” he said.
When evaluating the character and work ethic of recruits, home visits and the opinions of the guys already in the locker room help coaches make their decisions.
“We’ll go to a home visit to see the environment they have at home as a family, how they act around their parents,” Kauffmann said. “If they’re respectful and take out the garbage and do little things like that.”
With emphasis on culture, it’s not shocking that the guys on the team spend time with recruits after matches or practice, releasing the pressure of doing or saying the wrong thing in front of coaches. But make no mistake, these conversations are just as much an interview as meetings with the coaches are, albeit more laid-back.
Kauffmann said he values his players’ input on potential additions to the team as much as his own intuition.
“The recruiting piece is 50% from the players,” he said.
Despite the fine-tuned process, when it comes to the cornerstones of the program that have helped Kauffmann turn Kentucky into a collegiate tennis force, their recruiting stories could not be more different.
Gabriel Diallo, a son of immigrant parents in Montreal, had an unpolished but great game with no interest from colleges. That’s when Kauffmann’s phone rang from a friend he played on the ATP tour with.
“I went up there and I loved the way he played,” Kauffmann said. “He was not very good, but I loved that he had a lot of potential.”
From there, after Kauffmann spent the day with Diallo’s family and explained how he wanted to help, Diallo received and accepted an offer from Kentucky that same day.
The Canadian reached a career high as the No. 2 singles player and was a two-time SEC First Team player in his time in blue before turning pro and shining at the 2024 U.S. Open.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the 2021 National Player of the Year Liam Draxl, who led the team to the 2022 National Championship versus Virginia, was an International Tennis Federation (ITF) top 10 player coming out of high school.
For Kauffmann, landing a highly-touted recruit such as Draxl meant using a little bit of reverse psychology.
“We were competing against the big tennis programs around the country and kind of chewed out his game,” he said. “I said, ‘You’re not good enough,’ where every school was saying, ‘You’re so good, you’re so good.’ I said, ‘You’re not very good,’ and he actually liked it.”
Changes to name, image and likeness rules on athletes benefiting financially during college have also profoundly impacted the major college sports, especially with the transfer portal, but that isn’t necessarily so in tennis, Kauffmann said.
Out of all the players who enter the portal, only four to five of them have a skillset good enough to join Kentucky’s roster, forcing the head coach to be intentional with who and what he looks for in the portal.
For Kentucky, the portal is mostly used to add maturity when the team is on the younger side according to Kauffmann.
Senior captain Taha Baadi, for example, joined the team after a three-year stint at Wake Forest. He was recruited by Kauffmann out of high school but ultimately chose to wear the black and gold. Despite that, after his junior season, Baadi was looking for something new and decided to reach back out to Kauffmann.
“It was just to the point where I needed another voice,” Baadi said. “I knew that there was a lot of Canadians here at Kentucky doing well, so I just decided to make a little move and I’m glad that it’s paying off.”
Most of the Wildcats’ roster are from all over the world with four of them being from Canada, making Kentucky a brotherhood of guys making Lexington their home for a few years.
“Got a little lucky with Taha, we loved him from the beginning and he had a good career at Wake — not a great — but he just didn’t seem very happy,” Kauffmann said. “We were very glad that we picked him up.”
At Kentucky, Baadi was a team captain, played at court one singles for an entire year and recorded an 8-6 record against nationally ranked opponents, making him one of Kauffmann’s better additions through the transfer portal.
As Baadi’s tale showed, recruiting is a constant effort and the coaching staff can never fully give up on a player, even if he’s committed or playing elsewhere.
Eli Stephenson, who is from Louisville, was also originally committed to the University of Louisville but flipped his commitment after Kentucky’s staff was relentless in recruiting.
“Eli is the only talent that we’ve seen in Kentucky in the last five years that could play at Kentucky and we felt like this kid can contribute,” Kauffmann said.
The pressure Kauffmann was putting on Stephenson to commit initially scared him away, Kauffmann said, and he chose the safe local option. Ultimately, that was not enough to push away the Kentucky coaching staff, who continued its recruiting.
“He saw that we were doing good and started spending some more time with the guys and coming to matches,” Kauffmann said. “I think he liked the environment and switched.”
For these young men, tennis truly is everything as attending college is not a guaranteed full ride. Division-I tennis only allows for 4.5 full scholarships for 10 roster spots compared to basketball, which gets 13 full scholarships for 16 roster spots.
Working with such little money, Kauffmann said the program rarely gives out full rides to spread it out; the average player gets 45% of their schooling paid for while the rest is on the athlete.
With all the intricacies seen on the Division-I level it’s unsurprising that recruiting on a smaller scale, at National Association for Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) and Division-III colleges, is also slightly different than at the Division-I level.
At a NAIA school like Midway University, full athletic scholarships are also permitted, but not always common. Meanwhile, students who attend Division-III colleges cannot receive athletic scholarships at all.
Jordan Patterson, a 2022 Woodford County High School graduate, was recruited to play for Midway, a small school just a 25-minute drive from UK.
Patterson knew he wanted to remain local coming out of high school, but did not even know playing college tennis was possible for him until his senior year.
“My junior year actually, I kind of sucked, so I wasn’t gonna get recruited anywhere,” he said. “But my senior year, I took a pretty big jump.”
After jumping from court three doubles to court one singles, the tennis equivalent of moving from the last batter to the top of the lineup, playing college tennis was a real possibility for Patterson.
Typically, on the smaller scale, it’s on the athlete to contact coaches and promote themselves, but that wasn’t the case for Patterson.
“Actually, my college coach (Adam Malik) reached out to me first about it. He was the first coach out of everyone to reach out, which I really appreciated,” he said.
Going to a local university also provides a unique opportunity to meet with coaches more frequently than international students.
While most of Patterson’s high school matches and Midway’s matches lined up and prevented coach Malik from watching him play in person, they were still able to meet face-to-face due to their close distance.
“There were a few times he was in Versailles just running errands and he was like, ‘Let’s just stop and get a coffee or something,’” he said. “I would meet up with him and talk about the team for a half hour or so.”
Patterson was never able to attend a Midway match, but did make it to a few practices where he met captains and future teammates.
Similarly to Kauffmann and Loutit, Patterson’s love for tennis provided an opportunity for an education and new brotherhood in a sport that is underappreciated in college athletics.
Whether it’s at the levels of NAIA like Midway or the SEC at the Division-I level like Kentucky, college tennis recruiting is a far more intricate and personal process than many may realize.
“Kentucky men’s tennis is just one big family,” Loutit said. “I think that’s why we do so well.”