This year, she stands above them all.
She is 5-foot-5 and looks as though she weighs about a buck-twenty. She works in a department with 10 others at her level, all of them men, all of them with more experience coaching college athletes.
All the other coaches work in offices in the athletic department quad, while she is sequestered in an eight-by-eight portable, out by the tennis courts.
The office is bigger than a closet, smaller than what you might assume would be the working space for the most successful coach all year at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
What she has done in that small space has been, in a word, dazzling.
“This is where it all happens,” she said with a laugh last week in her portable. “Basically, everything I do happens right here, there’s no travel for recruiting or anything like that.”
She scours the world from a desktop computer, digging deep into streams of information on high school and collegiate tennis players with who might want to come to Hilo and yes, it requires more than a few clicks to get there.
Tina McDermott is distinctive in the UH-Hilo athletic department, first, for being the only woman coach, but this year, her second at the school, for being the only coach at the school whose program didn’t decline or stand still in the 2016-17 school year.
College and professional coaches will tell you, there’s no such thing as staying even, because everyone around you is getting better, so running in place equates to falling behind in the real world.
While the 2016-17 seasons ebbed with respect to winning records from the previous year in the UHH athletic department, tennis was the exception, led by a second-year coach seems to have figured a way to work the system.
Tennis got better, demonstrably, at UHH, with the men’s team posting 13 wins in 24 matches, more than doubling the number of wins from the previous year when McDermott was learning her way around.
In Year II, she unveiled a Czech Republic transfer from Division I Troy University in Alabama and Vaclav Slezak went on to a 19-4 record, playing No. 1 singles as a sophomore, earning him first team all-conference recognition and a Newcomer of the Year award by the Pacific West Conference.
Like his coach, it didn’t take Slezak long to make an imprint on the conference. He lost four singles matches, one to the International Tennis Association player of the year from Azusa Pacific and he lost twice to Filip Dolezal of Hawaii Pacific, last year’s national championship squad.
“He actually contacted me,” McDermott said of Slezak, “he was looking around and had an interest in Hawaii.”
It’s a fair point that you won’t often see a Division I starter in volleyball, basketball, soccer or baseball contacting UHH coaches to see if they have an open spot, but tennis a little different. Sometimes the tennis player isn’t as concerned with the finances, knowing they will get ranked if they play well, regardless of the school.
Still, it was McDermott who reeled him in and encouraged both his game and his academic pursuits. He earned a 3.7 grade point average an was recognized with an award for his efforts in the classroom.
“After a little bit of recruiting by Skype and watching YouTube videos, I was pretty sure he was going to come,” McDermott said. “He was very much up front with me and I was with him, it’s been a pleasure to have him here, obviously.”
She also reeled in Filiat Perez, a Spaniard who transferred from East Central Oklahoma University who played No. 2 singles and went 14-8, earning second team all-conference honors. Bruno Figlia found his way to Hilo from Brazil through Irvine Valley College, and was named second team all-conference in doubles play.
McDermott also coaches the women’s team, which didn’t have the same level of collective results, but her knack to recruit good talent was clearly visible in the season turned in by Daniella Sanz, a junior transfer from Barton Community College in Kansas, and a native of Brazil.
For Sanz, merging her academics and tennis chops to a school annually recognized as among the top diverse student bodies in the nation, was a comfy fit.
“It was tough for her playing at No. 1 (singles) because of the region we’re in,” McDermott said. “It meant that she faced the No. 1 player in the nation (Dallas Zhang, of nationally ranked BYU-Hawaii), and that was just the way it sort of unfolded. It’s tough to build your record up too much against that, but she battled and she will come back stronger (in the fall).”
Sanz still managed a 12-10 record, good enough for 10th in the regional rankings and 44th nationally.
The good news for her is that Zhang was a senior this season, a major impediment removed from Sanz’s senior season.
But next year is a new chapter and a point in which the coach will ratchet up the intensity just a bit.
“There’s no going back,” McDermott said, “I’ve already told (both teams), that next year, we should in the mix right at the top, that they should expect that and do what they need to do to get better (over the summer).”
Imagine that, a top 10 regional athletic team at UHH that plans to set up camp and stay right there.
“I just have a great group of people here,” McDermott said. “They want to do it all, they want to excel in the classroom, give back to the community and play really good tennis.”
It’s not a surprising approach in college athletics. All coaches, in their own way, talk about emphasizing those things.
Most of them don’t back it up with the imprint Tina McDermott has put on Vulcans’ tennis.
It’s why they named her West Region men’s tennis coach of the year, just two years after she was hired.
She’s the best thing going, at UHH and in the conference, and she’s just getting started.
