From Junior Player to D1 Team Captain to Behind the Scenes with TRO

A lot of growth happens during your senior year of college. From all of the “last, first times” to envisioning life after college to preparing for graduation, senior year can be a pivotal moment in the direction of your future. As a senior on the Georgia Southern women’s tennis team, I vividly remember the moment when I accepted my first job offer.

Having grown up with an affinity for writing and grammar, I had my sights set on a career where I could blend all of my passions together — writing, tennis, and ideally travel and photography. After searching for roles that aligned with my goals, I landed upon a Junior Tennis Director position with USTA Louisiana and confidently accepted a job in a city I had never been to.

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Where It All Started

Fast forward to June 2015, and I traveled ten hours to the city where I secured my first “adult job in the real world.” All of my hard work had led me to this moment — a moment that I can now look back on and appreciate how it spearheaded the journey to where I am today.

I grew up in Alpharetta, an Atlanta suburb and the city that I still call ‘home.’ Our neighborhood and country club had youth tennis clinics and coaches who were eager to set up local ALTA and USTA teams. Around the age of nine, after having a friend who dropped out of school to train and compete full-time, I decided to pick up my first racquet. Fast forward through my junior career, and I worked my way from second doubles to first singles in my local league roster and competed in state and regional USTA tournaments on a routine basis, year round. During that time, I secured a top 5 state ranking in GA, won a handful of tournaments, and led my high school tennis team to three 3A state championships. All the while, I also competed year-round on my high school and travel volleyball team — a team sport and athleticism that I’m confident helped me later on in my tennis career. We also claimed three state championships in volleyball during my career, which are moments that I’ll cherish forever. These feats, amongst countless upon countless hours of training and traveling, actually led me to be inducted into my high school’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 2023, which is one of my proudest moments to date.

The Journey

While my story has over a decade of background that sets the foundation for what’s next, I will save that for another time. Fast forward to the end of my Baton Rouge excursion with the USTA in 2016, and I packed up my car for Alpharetta once again. I knew that there was another step in my career that I needed to take in order to be one notch closer to my goals. I proceeded to start a tennis travel blog called Tennis Itinerary where I put all my passions into one domain. I began reaching out to every country club or resort who would answer my call or email and started to promote them for free on my website and social account. I wrote reviews, traveled to the location to take photos, interviewed Directors and staff, and curated social media posts, all because I loved anything that aligned with tennis, writing, travel, and photography.

I took a 3-week roadtrip around Florida and ventured to some of the most well-known tennis destinations such as Saddlebrook, IMG Academy, Four Seasons Resort Orlando, Lakewood Ranch, The Ritz Carlton – Key Biscayne, and so many more. Any vacation I took during that time, I would bring my camera and laptop and would hope to secure an interview with the Tennis Director or staff. Some of the most notable properties I covered were Kiawah Island Resort, Omni Amelia Island Resort, Reynolds Lake Oconee, and more. I was almost certain that I had found my niche market and even contacted and spoke to arguably the only other person in this space, Roger Cox. He provided me with insight about his company, Tennis Resorts Online. I saw that our sites were similar in nature, but I was focused more so on the social media and long-form interviews as opposed to the reviews that he had come to be known for. While we did not work together in any capacity at this point, I was driven by his success and knew that there was an audience for both of our websites.

After several months of hard yet exhilarating work, I was starting to see that this could ultimately become a career path. Yet, at the same time, I was eager for a full-time role and the opportunity to learn more in a company environment. I chose to put Tennis Itinerary on hold and to focus on securing a full-time job.

I accepted a 4-month role as the Miami Open Marketing Assistant during the 2017 tournament, a seasonal role that gave me new experiences but also could be a stepping stone to future, full-time opportunities. Around a month before the seasonal role was coming to a close, I reached out to the contact I had previously interviewed at IMG Academy for Tennis Itinerary. This connection ultimately led me to a seasonal camp sales opportunity, and I gladly accepted the position as a foot in the door. That seasonal role turned into a full-time position on the sales team. Then, it led to a more than six year career as a Marketing Manager. In this role, I dove into the industry and ignited my passion even further for email marketing, automation, copywriting, and digital media at one of the globe’s most prominent sports academies, formerly known as Bollettieri Tennis Academy, a setting where I had actually trained as a tennis camper as a teenager (queue full circle moment!)

What’s Ahead?

Shortly after leaving IMG Academy in the summer of 2023, I received a note from Scott Colebourne, whom I had met during my 6-month journey with Tennis Itinerary, and now he was joining Roger Cox at Tennis Resorts Online, the same Roger I had spoken to about Tennis Itinerary and Tennis Resorts Online eight years earlier. My professional worlds seemed to be colliding at a time when I wasn’t yet sure where my next steps would lead. I had garnered the knowledge and resume from my time at IMG Academy and had immensely more insight into how a website and social media business were run. I was confident in what I could bring to any organization with almost a decade of experience under my belt. When the opportunity to start contributing to Tennis Resorts Online presented itself, I knew at that moment that everything that had happened to this point was aligning just as it was meant to be.

When Scott shared his vision for what Tennis Resorts Online could become, I immediately recognized that my prior Tennis Itinerary endeavor was coming to light in a different way than I originally envisioned on my own.

Six months later, I am proudly the sender behind Tennis Resorts Online’s bi-weekly newsletter, as well as helping to guide the strategy behind the social media, blogs and articles, website, and more. If you’re a tennis director, you may see my name come across your inbox if you’re advertising with us. If you’re a tennis fan or a travel lover, I certainly hope we cross paths one day, or, at minimum, that our posts influence your next racquet travels. I am incredibly excited for the future of TRO and for my next steps in the world of racquet sports.

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