Ten days after the biggest tennis match of her life, 10 days before another that will be even bigger, Paulina Rys is spending Tuesday, April 28, watching television. This TV session is no break for the Forest Hills resident, however: Eyes fixed on ESPN, she’s ready to learn what her team will be seeded in the NCAA Women’s Championship that starts May 8.
It’s remarkable that Rys and her team have come so far. The April 18 match that won the Fairfield University Stags their automatic NCAA bid was the program’s first conference title since 2004. Rys, too, seemed anything but destined for a fruitful tennis career when she was a young teenager the Kew-Forest School and two torn ACLs nearly derailed any prospect of Division I athletics.
“Those were two crucial moments in my life,” Rys says of her injuries, which occurred when she was 14 and 17. “Coming out of two major surgeries, you don’t really know how to bounce back from that. … It really offset a whole new way of thinking, and I had to reroute myself in terms of what choices I had.”
Coming back the second time, Rys, after years as a tennis wunderkind, stringed together an unprecedented series of losses and began to doubt her ability to do what she once could. Her spirits were saved by the coaches and faculty who kept her motivated and reminded her to focus on her academics; her Division I hopes were saved when she found herself recruited by Fairfield.
Immediately, she knew her team would be capable of something special.
“When I met these girls, I was like, ‘This is a winning team,’ ” Rys said. “We were a great team and we had so much potential, so it just motivated me.”
She represented her team in the top singles position right from the start of her freshman year. This season, as a junior, Rys won 16 consecutive singles matches to finish out the season, and she was named Most Outstanding Performer at the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference’s championship tournament, held at the Billie Jean King USTA National Tennis Center in Flushing.
For Rys, the pressure to perform at the site of the U.S. Open was less considerable than you might expect: Her whole tennis life, she has trained at the two-blocks-away West Side Tennis Club, former home of the Open, in Forest Hills. But that doesn’t mean the experience of inching out Niagara University in the final match – after barely edging out Loyola in the second round, after easily losing to Marist in the previous year’s tournament – wasn’t daunting.
“I told myself, ‘There is no way I am going to lose,’ ” Rys remembers.
Then a series of jubilant sounds emerged from a teammate’s court.
“I hear screams, everyone is running, and I’m stuck on the court, and the umpire just calls me in, and we could have finished [my] match [but] I just shook [my opponent’s] hand and the racquet flew,” Rys said. “I can’t be prouder of my entire team. Every single person on this team is deserving of some kind of applause.”
More applause awaits the Stags when they begin the 64-team NCAA tournament one day after Rys’ 21st birthday.
“This is probably the best 21st birthday present that anyone could ever get,” she said.
