Consensus All-American Bill Lenoir of Tucson High went on to play at Wimbledon six times, beating UCLA legend Arthur Ashe in 1962.<\/p>\n
All-American Willie Hernandez, who grew up in the Philippines, played in the 1961 U.S. Open and at Wimbledon in 1962.<\/p>\n
UA standout Pete Barizon, from San Francisco, went on to be a tennis coach at Florida State and Colorado State.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
UA standout Fred Drilling, the son of an All-American tennis player from Michigan State, was an ITA All-American in 1964.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In 2016, Snyder sent me a handwritten, four-page letter detailing the success of Lenoir and his UA teammates in the ’60s.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
Snyder left to coach at his alma mater, Texas, in 1972.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Consensus All-American Bill Lenoir of Tucson High went on to play at Wimbledon six times, beating UCLA legend…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[634,64,63,174033,294067,252864,166050,85,747,46372],"class_list":["post-675259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-american-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-ncaa-division-i","tag-ncaa-division-i-fbs-football","tag-ncaa-division-i-fbs-football-teams","tag-oklahoma-sooners-football","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-university-of-arizona"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}