Consensus All-American Bill Lenoir of Tucson High went on to play at Wimbledon six times, beating UCLA legend Arthur Ashe in 1962.
All-American Willie Hernandez, who grew up in the Philippines, played in the 1961 U.S. Open and at Wimbledon in 1962.
UA standout Pete Barizon, from San Francisco, went on to be a tennis coach at Florida State and Colorado State.
UA tennis player George Stoesser, from Carmel, Calif., also played in the U.S. Open. He was an ITA All-American in 1961 and 1962.
UA standout Fred Drilling, the son of an All-American tennis player from Michigan State, was an ITA All-American in 1964.
And after that core group of the early ’60s built Arizona into a Top 10 program, along came Brian Cheney, an ITA All-American in 1966, 1967 and 1968, leading Arizona to Top 10 finishes in the NCAA finals twice.
In 2016, Snyder sent me a handwritten, four-page letter detailing the success of Lenoir and his UA teammates in the ’60s.
“To conclude,” he wrote, “I think we finished as high as third in the NCAA finals while Bill was on the team and the UA finished in the Top 10 nationally seven more times.”
Snyder left to coach at his alma mater, Texas, in 1972.
This isn’t to subtract from Shields’ remarkable success at Arizona. Hired away from Utah State in 2016 by athletic director Greg Byrne, Shields inherited a program in such decay that his first two Arizona teams went a combined 0-15 in the Pac-12, continuing their decades-long losing streaks to Stanford, UCLA and USC. Then it all changed. Arizona has been 34-5 in conference standings the last five seasons. They finished No. 9 in the men’s tennis poll in 2024.