Hyman expects new outdoor facility to give recruiting a boost
For South Carolina senior Ivan Machado, the new $4.5 million Carolina Tennis Center is on sacred ground.
Machado recalled when Sarge Frye Field, the “sacred” old baseball stadium, was where the new Carolina Tennis Center now stands. In his last season, Machado has seen the vision he’s awaited come to life, as the Carolina Tennis Center was dedicated on Monday afternoon.
“I know it took a long time, but sometimes to be this good, it has to take a long time to be ready,” Machado said. “It’s just a dream come true. I know I’m only going to play here one year, but I know all my teammates are very excited to be here three or four years.”
USC men’s tennis coach Josh Goffi chose Machado to speak on behalf of the team.
“He’s been waiting on this for a long time,” he said. “It was talked about for a long time, and it finally came to fruition. I’m just happy he’s able to play his senior season here. It means a lot to him and he gets giddy and gets goosebumps every time he walks onto the court here.”
Though the Gamecocks won’t play their first match in the new outdoor facility until Feb. 25, weather permitting, they couldn’t contain their excitement at the dedication ceremony, as Goffi praised the design and the speed of the courts. For Goffi, the promise of the new facility was one of the reasons he left Duke to be the coach at USC, and it was one of the reasons he was able to recruit a freshman class that has led the Gamecocks to a 7-1 record.
“Before all of this, it was a tough place to recruit to, to be totally honest,” Goffi said. “We were about 40 years behind in the recruiting battle because of facilities. Because of this facility, we were able to recruit a top-five team. Obviously, this made a huge difference.”
While the men’s tennis team hasn’t played in the new center, the women’s squad played against Furman in the facility’s inaugural match. For women’s tennis coach Arlo Elkins, who’s been waiting for a facility like this one for the 29 years that he’s coached at USC, the new center, which has 12 courts, is better than he had hoped.
“As tennis coaches, we never think that they’re doing a good job,” Elkins said. “We raise questions, ‘Why’d you put this here and why’d you put that there?’ But when all was said and done, they did an unbelievable job on this facility.”
Similar to Machado, getting to play in the new facility is a reward for Dijana Stojic, also a senior, who had also heard so much about the facility but went most of her career without seeing it. She and Machado spoke at the dedication ceremony on behalf of their respective squads.
“Since my freshman year, everybody was telling me how we were getting a new facility, and semester after semester, I was hearing the same story,” Stojic said. “Now in my senior year — my last semester — I’m standing here giving a speech about our new great Gamecock home.”
For both coaches, the new home is something they can show off to fellow coaches, as it ranks among the best tennis facilities in the nation.
“They’ve all asked, ‘Where can I get photographs? I want to see it – where can I get renderings?’” Goffi said. “We pointed them in the right place and I just get an amazing reaction, ‘Wow. It’s absolutely gorgeous.’ They’re taking those renderings back to their athletics department to see what they can do.”
Athletics Director Eric Hyman said the Carolina Tennis Center is just another part of the improvements to athletics that he and the board of trustees have instituted since he arrived. He said it’s important to a recruit to know that the athletics department is committed to supporting him or her through tangible changes.
“This is a part of the equation,” Hyman said. “It’s obviously a magnificent facility. It’s a facility that we all can be very proud of, but we are competing in the SEC and since we’re competing, no matter what the sport is for our student-athletes, we’ve got to provide the support so that we can compete at a very high level, which was ultimately the goal of what the board laid out to me when I first got here.”
The new facility will also contribute to both teams’ desires to fill the stands. Goffi called his team “entertainers and performers” and said the new outdoor setting would be attractive to fans wanting to enjoy the spring weather on a Friday afternoon, especially with the location in the middle of the Athletics Village.
Though Machado and Stojic will get to play in the Carolina Tennis Center for one semester, they won’t take the season for granted after the three years that they’ve waited.
“All the guys are excited,” Machado said. “The first practice we had outside, we were basically screaming the entire time because we were so excited. It was definitely a shocker when we first got here and first saw the facility. We couldn’t believe what we saw.”