By Dylan Fink | Sports Writer
Women’s tennis head coach Joey Scrivano has built his career around developing his players through unconventional means. The six-time Big 12 Coach of the Year leads his team through an array of lessons taken from the Boston Celtics.
“I love the Celtics,” Scrivano said. “What a great organization, that’s what it’s all about. There’s a great saying with that team though, and it’s that ‘being a Celtic is a way of life.’ That’s really the whole thing … What I want to do here is to keep making this program a way of life.”
Scrivano sat at a wooden table, his legs crossed, with a gas-station coffee in hand on a humid Wednesday morning. His office is decorated with antique rackets pinned to a wall beside a windowsill that plays host to a handful of unaligned trophies. The veteran coach took the opportunity to reflect on his journey through the sport.
“I picked up tennis later in life,” Scrivano said. “I was 14, which — you know, saying starting anything at 14 is ‘later’ is funny, but if you’re trying to be a good player that is very late.”
Scrivano grew up in a hub for junior tennis in Cambridge, Ontario. The town’s population hovered around 70,000 while he was growing up, but more than a handful of local junior players found their way to collegiate tennis on scholarship, Scrivano said.
Seeking to be one of the kids to make it to the next level, the Canadian gave the game everything he had for the next four years. Scrivano made his journey to the U.S. in 1992 when he joined the men’s tennis team at Eastern Michigan on scholarship.
Ypsilanti, Mich., is where Scrivano discovered his passion for coaching the sport to which he’d dedicated eight years of his life. When a coaching vacancy opened his senior year, the four-year letterwinner took hold of the situation and switched to the other side of the court.
“I asked the guys on the team, like, ‘Hey, can I coach the team while we try to find a coach?’” Scrivano said. “I decided we weren’t going to have a bad year, so I stepped up into the coaching role then.”
Throughout his collegiate journey, Scrivano said he saw God revealing to him that coaching was the path he was meant to take. Beginning with his experience leading Eastern Michigan his senior year, the budding young coach began to surround himself with mentors and figures in the sport he believed he could learn from.
“You want to have a lot of different mentors when it comes to solving some of the more challenging things in tennis because you have got to find people with experience to do it,” Scrivano said. “Not only from an educational standpoint, but you got to know coaches that have been in the trenches and have figured out what they’re dealing with.”
Following the end of his college career, Scrivano began the search for a coaching opportunity wherever he could find one. Throughout the late ’90s, he suffered through the Rick Pitino era of the Celtics and bounced around a few assistant coaching gigs in Alabama and Illinois.
Scrivano spent time as an assistant at Mobile, Northwestern and South Alabama before he eventually took the reins for the Jaguars at the turn of the century. In his first three years at the helm of South Alabama, Scrivano won two Sun Belt Coach of the Year awards.
Come 2002, schools across the nation came calling for the young women’s tennis coach to come take over their program. At the top of that list was Baylor, which Scrivano had kept on his radar following a visit for a tournament the previous season.
“I’ll never forget that first time driving down University Parks [Drive] and just seeing there before me what was possible here,” Scrivano said. “You could see that this was just a beautiful facility and that this was a school that was dedicated to tennis.”
When the Baylor position became available that following summer, Scrivano immediately applied. His initial hopes of taking over the women’s program in Waco were stifled when the men’s coach for the Bears at the time made it clear to Scrivano the school was going in a different direction.
Following the rejection, Scrivano turned his attention toward an interview at Louisville.
“They brought me out there, and knowing I’m Italian, of course they had Rick Pitino there for me to meet,” Scrivano said. “I wanted to tell him about his time with the Celtics — that, you know, [Larry Bird] isn’t walking through that door anytime soon. I started to tell him that, but I didn’t get to ... But my point to that was, they were recruiting me really hard.”
Scrivano credits a mentor for advising him to wait a day or two to think about the Louisville offer. During that short window, Baylor came calling back.
“I told them if they couldn’t get me to Waco in 24 hours then I was going to take the Louisville job,” Scrivano said. “When I got down here it was really apparent that the AD at the time, a guy named Tom Stanton, wanted to win.”
Once making the quick journey to Waco, Scrivano knew it wouldn’t take much to get him to commit to Baylor’s offer. The Sun Belt champion’s interview opened with a question that baffled Big 12 programs for decades: what was his plan to beat Texas?
“I loved that,” Scrivano said. “Right away I was sold, and I answered the question by saying that I wasn’t worried about Texas, but rather, I was already looking towards Stanford, who had won like 20 national titles at the time.”
The Bears went on to win 11 conference championships in the coach’s first 13 seasons and won 12 straight matches over the Longhorns. They did so to the tune of Scrivano’s beloved Celtics metaphors.
“I actually share with the team a lot about the Celtics,” Scrivano said. “You’d be amazed how well that works with tennis. They love it.”
Scrivano, who coaches a team with a majority of international students, tells tales of the Celtics’ storied history to build team camaraderie among his players. The coach repeatedly said that if he goes too long without using a Celtics metaphor in practice, the players will call him out and complain.
“I want them to think of our team as an organization that handles things together,” Scrivano said. “We’ll look at the Bill Russell era, the [Larry] Bird era or the [Kevin Garnett] era and say, ‘OK, here’s how they handled this, now how does that apply to our situation?’”
The team is at the center of everything that Scrivano does as a coach. He credits tennis as the truest team sport, noting that how no matter how well an athlete plays in a match, her win only counts as one point. One player can’t drag an entire team to victory on the courts; everyone has to do their part.
“On the court we can’t doubt each other because we’re all working as one,” senior Na Dong said in November. “Our strategy and our techniques work because we’re sticking to Coach Joey’s plan and just being disciplined all the time.”
Scrivano will lead the Bears (12-7, 7-4 Big 12) into the final stretch of the regular season Thursday at Colorado (10-11, 2-9 Big 12). The Big 12 Tournament is set for April 15-19 in Orlando, Fla.
