By Jackson Posey | Sports Writer
Liubov Kostenko was born to be a star.
The daughter of a tennis coach, five-year-old Kostenko quickly became a fixture at tennis courts around her home country of Ukraine, often tagging along to watch her mother train local players. Inevitably, she picked up a racket of her own – and never set it back down.
“Once, she took me with her [to work], and it was tennis courts [with] so many people,” said Kostenko, now a senior at Baylor. “I was very extrovert[ed], I’d say, so it was very fun. And then I started playing. I loved it. … I wanted to do it, and then it just happened because it was so easy. My mom goes there in the morning, I go with her, and then I stay in the club for the whole day.”
Whole days eventually turned into whole weeks, as what began as pure curiosity grew into an insatiable appetite for winning. Kostenko was born into a generational wave of Ukrainian tennis talent; on the heels of international sensation Elina Svitolina’s rise to prominence, Ukraine became one of the major hotspots of youth women’s tennis in the 2010s, boasting what the Women’s Tennis Association’s Alex Macpherson once called “youth and depth unrivaled by any other country.” Today, eight of the nation’s top 15 players were born from 2000-2004, twice as many as the United States’ four.
“We have a huge amateur tennis movement in Ukraine – let’s say the best amateur players,” Evgeniy Zukin, head of the Ukrainian Tennis Federation, said in 2019. “Better than Russians, better than anywhere. We have a few national amateur leagues and people travel as professionals from town to town for tournaments. They get mad about tennis and they have fans. This is really important because they want their kids to be tennis players.”
Among the players on Zukin’s mind was Kostenko, who had earned top-50 junior status, reached the ITF Tour finals in her pro debut in Chornomorsk and competed in the U16 and U14 World Cups.
“They all want to be better than each other, so that’s how they get better and better,” retired Ukrainian tennis star Olga Savchuk said at the time. “They also feel they’re not the youngest now – it creates a virtuous cycle. If you’re the only good junior you might relax but they also feel that [Daria] Lopatetska, Kostenko are coming. All of them push each other to the limits.”
Many of the stars from that period have continued on the professional path. Marta Kotsyuk, 22, climbed to No. 18 in the WTA doubles rankings. Dayana Yastremska, 24, is up to No. 34. But Kostenko chose the non-traditional route: moving to America to play collegiate tennis at Syracuse University.
“No one really supported me going here, because also in Ukraine, we have this stereotype that if you come here, it’s done for your tennis,” Kostenko said. “I wanted to go even a year earlier, everyone was like, ‘No, you gotta stay here, you will be professional, blah blah blah.’ But I was like, ‘It’s not working, but let’s see how it goes. One more year.’”
At the end of that year, Kostenko enrolled at Syracuse, which she said had been recruiting her for “three or four years.” But while sitting out her freshman season due to NCAA rules about previous career earnings, Russia invaded Ukraine. And everything changed.
“My first year, I think it wasn’t as hard, but then the war started,” Kostenko said. “I couldn’t go home for my first summer break. It was hard. And then last year I went home for summer, and it was very hard leaving home.
“I think it’s easier when you’re with your family and your friends. And even though I went home this summer and electricity was going off, and sometimes we didn’t have water or anything … it’s so much easier when you are with them, you go through this together, rather than, ‘I have everything here, my life’s great,’ and then people that I care about, they’re suffering.”
Kostenko’s story resonated with students across Syracuse’s campus, who rallied to start a supply drive for those affected by the war in Ukraine. Since transferring to Baylor for her sophomore year, Kostenko, too, has poured herself into volunteering for the cause.
“She just has a great heart; she just wants to give back,” said Baylor head coach Joey Scrivano. “She spent countless hours with Unbound, which is a nonprofit in Waco that helps with human trafficking in Europe, but in particular in Ukraine. She put in, I don’t know, about 200 hours of community service with them? I mean, that’s amazing.”
Scrivano had known of Kostenko since taking a 2019 recruiting trip through Kyiv and Moscow – “It’s a wild thing that that wasn’t that long ago” – but wasn’t able to recruit her due to the language barrier and power of the Ukrainian Tennis Federation. Once Kostenko hopped in the transfer portal in June 2022, though, the Bears pounced.
“I had a livestream on my Instagram, and my friend, [then-Baylor tennis player and Ukraine native] Anita Sahdiieva … was like, ‘Are you in America?’” Kostenko said. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been here for a year now.’ She’s like, ‘Come to Baylor!’ And I was like, ‘Whaaat?’” She’s like, ‘Yeah, you can come here, we have a good team.’ And I [had] heard of Baylor – well, I heard they have nice clothes. But also, like, it’s a good team.”
After a little more digging into the culture and the program, and after Sahdiieva gave Scrivano her full endorsement, Kostenko made the move. She’s been rocking green and gold ever since.
“She just got a really good heart, good person,” Scrivano said. “I think she just leads by example, especially on a match day. If a match is coming down to the wire and it’s coming down to her, we all feel really good about that because we know she’s just gonna do everything, she’s gonna leave it all on the court. And that’s all you can ask for.
“I think that’s her biggest leadership quality is just her competitiveness, and just showing that. No matter what ailment she has and whatever – she’s gonna just fight to the bitter end.”
Kostenko’s first name, Liubov, comes from her grandmother – and a Ukrainian word meaning “love.” The big-hearted girl from Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, still loves eating her mother’s honey-and-ginger lemons, a family recipe made with grandpa’s homemade honey. And as much as she loves Waco, a piece of her still longs for home.
“I think it was easier when I was just not going home for a while, and then you get more used to it,” Kostenko said. “But once you went home, and then you have to go back – it hurts.”
