Finally, Time for Tennis : UCI’s Uma Rao Took Care of First Things First, Then Her First Love

Doreen Irish, UCI women’s tennis coach, answered her office phone one morning last summer to a vaguely familiar voice.

Uma Rao?

If the voice didn’t register, the name certainly did. Rao once was one of Southern California’s top junior players, ranking eighth in the Southern California Section of the United States Tennis Assn. 12-and-under and 14-and-under divisions. She was that frail little girl with the power of a cannon and the stamina of a ball machine.

Uma isn’t the type of name you forget. And Irish remembered clearly her spurned efforts to recruit Rao to UCI four years earlier.

So, here was Rao on the phone, asking for another chance to try out.

Irish’s response?

“I was really surprised,” she said. “I hadn’t seen Uma play in three years, so I had no idea where she would fit in on the team. But, I knew she’d make the team.”

Of course, she did. That wasn’t even an issue, given Rao’s background.

She was 11 when University High School Coach Karen Speros first saw her play at the Racket Club of Irvine.

“Uma looked like a total prodigy,” she said. “She could have been another Tracy Austin.”

Speros wasn’t the only one who was impressed.

Linda Cushing, former director of the Tennis College at the Newport Beach Tennis Club, started coaching Rao when she was 9, and assessed her potential after just a few lessons.

“I don’t see why Uma won’t be a world-class player,” she told Koganti Rao, Uma’s father.

For a while, Rao took the right steps to become just that. Weekly lessons, daily three-hour practice sessions and weekend tournaments filled her pre-adolescent schedule.

Rao entered University High School at 13 on top of the singles ladder, and lost only a handful of league matches in three years.

“Uma had just a phenomenal freshman and sophomore year,” Speros said.

And then she disappeared from the courts.

Rao stopped playing USTA tournaments the summer after her sophomore year, and played just one more high school season before she graduated at 16.

Irish recruited her heavily, only to learn that studying was far more important to the pre-med student than any silly game.

“I think it just came to a choice of priorities,” Rao said. “I think if I felt like I could make it or play high up at Stanford or somewhere like that, I wouldn’t have stopped. But, because I was No. 8, (I stopped). I mean, No. 8 is good, but it’s not great.”

Besides, she had other things on her mind. Rao’s strict family, from India, had reared her under one very powerful doctrine: education before everything.

Said Uma’s father: “I always felt education comes first and tennis second, so in the beginning when she decided to go to UCI, we were thinking of a good education.”

It’s been that way all along. Rao skipped a grade in elementary school and spent her high school summers collecting extra units. At 15, she took her first college course, a French course that earned her college and high school units.

She entered UCI as a biological sciences major, convinced that any distractions would jeopardize her chances for medical school.

But she realized after one quarter that she didn’t want to become a doctor and changed her major to computer science.

She never really did change her mind about tennis. For four years, Rao hovered around the Racket Club of Irvine, weighted down with books. She worked in the day-care center and the bookkeeping department, but rarely made it to the court.

“It was hard to make the transition to ‘Oh, I’ll just be a social weekend player,’ ” she said. “It’s hard when you don’t have anything to work for to just keep playing tennis, because when I play tennis, I don’t really just mess around.”

Still, Rao played about once every two months throughout college, on the rare occasions when her younger brother, Ramesh, needed a practice partner.

Something changed last summer. Rao had accumulated enough units to graduate in the fall; she was a little apprehensive about starting her career at 19, and she wanted to return to serious tennis. She decided to lighten her academic load and stay at UCI at least through June.

She decided to contact Irish.

“I figured: I’m going to be there and I’m going to have a lot of extra time, and it seemed like it would be fun to start playing tennis again,” Rao said. “That’s the main reason I did it, for fun.”

So she dusted off her racket and began to play.

Rao entered two local club tournaments and then called former UCI tennis player, Margarite Laccabue. By July, she had gained enough confidence to contact Stephanie Rhorer, UCI’s top singles player. Rao had faced Rhorer in high school matches, but had never won.

Said Rhorer: “I was kind of nervous because I was going, ‘God, here’s this girl. She hasn’t played in four years, and I play college tennis,’ and I’m thinking, ‘What if she beats me?’ That’s my first thought, and I go out there and during the first set she couldn’t miss anything and I lost 6-3.

“I’m thinking maybe I should take four years off.”

Rhorer won the next two sets, 6-0, 6-0, but left the court feeling a little defeated and even more apprehensive about fall challenge matches.

“When she’s on, she’s very on,” Rhorer said. “It’s scary.”

Rao challenged her way into the top six last fall, and as the No. 4, and sometimes No. 5, singles player she has compiled an 18-8 record.

She defeated Dena Levy of (then) No. 1-ranked USC and she got UCI’s only point in matches against Brigham Young and United States International University.

“It’s nice to think that you can rely on somebody like that on a team to always get the point,” Rhorer said. “I can think of a lot of people who I would never, ever in a million years go ‘God, we need this point and I think that this person right here (will get it.)’ ”

Said Rao: “I think it’s partly because I don’t put as much pressure on myself as the other girls do,” she said. “Tennis for me is for fun.”

Of course, it’s always more fun to win. Rao struggled through a three-hour match against the University of Utah’s Susie Westfall before winning, 6-2, 4-6, 7-6. Rao was up in the second set 4-1, and let it get away. But there was no cause for concern.

“She was just laughing the whole time,” Rhorer said. “A lot of people would have just snapped . . . I said, ‘Get this over with,’ and she just goes, ‘OK, I’ll just put her away or whatever.’ I wish I had that attitude.”

Rao wishes she could play one more year.

“The first year, you’re just getting used to it, and you don’t really know what’s going on,” she said. “The only way I could do that is if I got my MBA at UCI or I went for another major. . . . But I don’t think that’s really worth it. It would essentially be a waste, just to have fun.”

She is interviewing at Hughes Aircraft and other defense corporations. She would like to be a young executive at age 20.

After all, she’s had enough of this school business.