2018 Case Western Reserve University graduate and current M.D. student Nithya Kanagasegar helped turn around the Spartans’ women’s tennis program. In her playing days, she was named the 2016 UAA Most Valuable Player and in her senior year, joined doubles partner Madeleine Paolucci in becoming the first All-America honorees in program history. 

Coaching

She did not have a woman coach until playing for Kirsten Gambrell McMahon. “I wouldn’t have accomplished what I did if it had not been for her. That was really special to have a young coach who could both relate to us and hit with us. She was really good at tennis and had the best hands on the team, even when she was pregnant,” Kanagasegar laughed. “A lot of us responded to her style and her high emotional IQ. She played at a high level herself, knew her players well, and knows women well.”

That last fact was particularly important to Kanagasegar. “One of the first things I became aware of as a female player was that we all had male coaches. I only remember one older woman who was even remotely involved in teaching tennis,” she recalled. “The male coaches didn’t recognize or understand how women’s bodies are different, that the game is different for us. There are certain techniques that work with men, but not with the way women’s bodies move.”

Kanagasegar’s college career was even more remarkable considering that she made a last-minute decision to even play tennis in college. “I played soccer and basketball early on, but quickly realized that wasn’t going to work for me. My brother played tennis and I thought it looked cool, so I decided to try it,” she remembered. “My parents, especially my mom, watched a lot of tennis so I was familiar with legendary women’s players like Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova. Being in a small town (Crossville, Tennessee) with no large academy, there were periods where I would be so frustrated and want to quit. I went to Knoxville for a while to be able to train at a higher level. No one in my family had played a college sport. I committed on the very last day to make the decision.”

Playing Style

“There was one other girl in my town who played tennis. We had a similar style, the same coach, and played together. It wasn’t until I played tournaments that I realized my style was different from a lot of other girls,” she recollected. “People told me that I ‘played like a guy.’ I felt good about it because I liked to play aggressively, focusing on strong ground strokes and being willing to finish at the net. At the same time, I didn’t find that not being a ‘pusher’ was gender specific.” 

The college level was where Kanagasegar found more obvious differences in the way men’s and women’s tennis were viewed. “A lot of people had an impression that women’s players didn’t work as hard as the men’s. I was running a captain’s practice in my senior year when we were sharing courts with the men when one of the younger men’s players said, ‘wow, the girls really work hard’ and asked if we were a top-20 team. (The Spartans ended the season ranked 15^th by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association),” recollected Kanagasegar, who realized quickly that she needed to work hard to be successful in college tennis.

“I lost every match my first year at UAA’s (2015 UAA Tennis Championships). I didn’t get the chance to play a lot of strong players before college and now I was an 18-year-old with no muscle battling with these really smart 22-year-old women who worked hard for every single point,” she recalled. She first played four-time NCAA Division III singles champion, and recent Australian Open qualifier,  Eudice Chong of Wesleyan University during her sophomore season. Kanagasegar and Paolucci took the top-seeded tandem of Chong and Victoria Yu to the limit in the semifinals of the 2018 NCAA Division III Women’s Tennis Doubles Championship.

She finished a combined 36-23 record in singles and doubles in her first season, including reaching the Central Regional semifinal round of the ITA Fall Singles Championship. “Someone called me ‘the CJ of the women’s team’ (referring to CWRU’s all-time victories leader C.J. Krimbill),” she stated. “By the time I was a senior, I was thinking, ‘Why can’t I just be the Nithya of the women’s team?’” Kanagasegar finished her illustrious career with a combined 132 singles and doubles victories.

Subtle Differences

Kanagasegar witnessed multiple discrepancies in how men’s and women’s tennis are perceived during her college career.

“The women’s players in Division III also know what is happening in men’s tennis, while the men tended to only know what was happening with the men’s teams. Maybe we were just used to keep up with men’s sports as a society,” she pondered. “I know Maddie (Paolucci, her All-America doubles partner in 2018 and the most prolific women’s player in CWRU history), watched a lot of pro tennis.”

She would have liked to have seen the same support from the men’s team that the women’s team showed for them. “We would always go the men’s matches if we weren’t away, but the men did not support us nearly as much. We were there because we respected their program, but their top players would not come to watch us,” Kanagasegar noted. “I think that has gotten a lot better over time.”

She acknowledges that her CWRU experience was skewed positively for the most part. “Other athletes were very respectful of our team and there were times I could relate to the men’s game with the fire they possessed,” she commented. “The difficult thing was half-baked ideas that people had. People would say things like, ‘It is way easier to do better in tennis than in other sports or men saying, ‘If I was a woman’s player, I would be the number one player in the country,’ or guys who played in high school saying, ‘Oh, I bet I could beat you’ simply because I am a woman. Men may be physically stronger, but in a sport like tennis, it is a disservice to technique and intelligence to make assumptions like that. Don’t discredit the tennis IQ I have.”

In June 2018, Kanagasegar became the first recipient of the ITA Ann Lebedeff Award, endowed by one of tennis’ most legendary figures Billie Jean King. The award was created to honor a recent college graduate who demonstrated excellence and leadership on and off the court. Having communicated concerns with discrimination and injustices, particularly as they related to gender, Kanagasegar led the first “Sustained Dialogue” group in the nation specifically for student-athletes to discuss these issues.

Moving Forward

In January 2019, former world’s number one women’s player Amélie Mauresmo began coaching French men’s player Lucas Pouille. “That attracted a lot of attention, yet so many men coach women and no one blinks an eye,” Kanagasegar asserted.

“I think cultural awareness can lead to smaller changes in the way women’s tennis is perceived. It comes from the top and both who is coaching, and the way people are coached,” she pointed out. “I only saw one woman coach when I went to Knoxville and she was coaching beginners, yet she was a top player in Puerto Rico. I was so used to it at the time that I didn’t even think about until I reflected on it later in my career.”

“I do think tennis is unique in that people generally know of professional players on the women’s side almost as well as they know those on the men’s side. There are inequities, but it is not so much an issue of exposure,” she continued. “However, there are a lot of inequities and financial abuse. We still have a long way to go as we see with things like the New York Times using a photo of Venus Williams in a story about Serena Williams (in a March 2022 story).”