THE OTHER SIDE OF THE NET : Carney Left Pro Tennis Circuit and Found a Niche Teaching the Sport

Tennis neophyte Bob Rosenbaum was trying very hard to return balls to his instructor, Shannon Gordon Carney, but he wasn’t hearing much encouragement from the opposite side of the net.

“Uh-oh,” Carney said as Rosenbaum blasted a volley into the net.

“Whoops,” she said as a ball banged off Rosenbaum’s racket and smacked the baseline windscreen behind her. “You were a little early on that. Keep your hands in front of you.”

Rosenbaum managed to slice a winner by her, then looked like a puppy trying to cajole a compliment from his master. But Carney wasn’t buying. “Eh, it was OK,” Carney said, pointing out that his mechanics were shaky. “You were right behind the ball. You want to be to the side.”

Carney then hit with Rosenbaum for a few minutes. When the hourlong lesson was up, Rosenbaum wiped his perspiring face with a towel. “My objective one day is to make her sweat,” said Rosenbaum, a manufacturer who lives in Bel-Air.

Barely glistening, Carney used to sweat on the court a lot more than she does now. A former All-American at UCLA, she played on the pro circuit for two years but retired in 1986 and became a teaching pro. These days, she only really sweats a few times a year, when she plays in Southern California Tennis Assn. Senior Grand Prix Masters tournaments.

This past weekend, she won the women’s 30 division in the Senior Grand Prix Masters Championships in San Diego.

Like a lot of the other 10,000 teaching pros certified by the United States Professional Tennis Assn., Carney, 33, originally hoped for a long and successful career on the pro circuit. But she never earned more than $8,000 a year, although she did tour the world and did crack the women’s top 200 rankings.

“I just didn’t do as well as I had wanted to,” said Carney, who lives in Van Nuys. “I probably should have given it another year. They say you should give it three years, but I was looking for some stability in my life.”

After she quit, however, she found out that sometimes, when dreams don’t come true, reality is the next best thing.

“I’m pretty lucky things turned out the way they did,” she said.

Carney teaches full-time at MountainGate Country Club, which is on the crest of a hill in the Santa Monica Mountains. From Court No. 4, she can see the setting sun paint the faraway mountains in shades of raspberry. Below, the headlights from rush-hour traffic on the San Diego Freeway meld to form a long, silvery strand.

“I’ve got it pretty good here,” she said after Rosenbaum’s lesson. “Just look at the view.”

Teaching is what Carney loves, although it took her some time to get in touch with her feelings. “I never thought of myself as being a teaching pro,” said Carney, who has the distinction of making All-City Section in boys’ tennis when she played on the Grant High varsity in 1975.

After giving up on a professional playing career, she couldn’t decide what to do. For a while, she considered getting into law or the film industry. Her parents, who live in Van Nuys, are veteran character actors. (Her father is cast in TV commercials as “the cute little grandpa type,” she said.)

From the time she played at UCLA, Carney always taught on the side, but she still didn’t think of a making a career of teaching until after getting a job at MountainGate as director of tennis activities in 1986. When the job was eliminated a year later, she persuaded the club to let her teach. By word of mouth, her teaching hours soon increased from three or four a week to 30.

“It’s hard to get a teaching job at a club,” she said. “There are hundreds of pros out there all competing for very few positions.”

As a teacher, Carney says “patience” is a necessity along with the fundamental desire to impart knowledge. “You have to find a way to get through to each student,” she said, “because they’re all different.” Carney has to be part theoretician, part psychologist. Rosenbaum, for example, thinks she has him pegged.

“She knows I like to be pushed,” he said, “so she pushes me.”

Rosenbaum has only been playing tennis for two months, but both he and Carney are satisfied with his progress. “That’s the rewarding part,” Carney said, “when someone gets better. I teach one lady who failed tennis in college. She told me her teacher said she had no hand-eye coordination, but now she plays well and loves the game.”

Some of Carney’s younger students have gone on to play college tennis. “A girl will come back from college and think she can beat me, but I still have the edge because I know her better than she does,” Carney said. “After all, I helped build her game.”

Carney likes to play in SCTA tournaments because they not only keep her in competitive shape but provide her with a cachet. “Believe me, your students know that you play and how well you’re doing,” she said. “It gives you credibility.”

Last year, Carney was ranked No. 1 in the SCTA in the women’s 30-34 age division, but she dropped to No. 2 this year, primarily because she limited her tournament appearances after getting married last February. Some of her 60 students noticed her drop in rank.

“They would tease me, ‘We’re going to find out who No. 1 is and take lessons from her,’ ” Carney said.

Carney has no complaints about her life these days, with one minor exception. Her husband Dale, a city building inspector, “has never picked up a tennis racket in his life,” Shannon said. “He plays handball. So maybe we’ll take up racquetball together. There’s got to be a medium ground.”