By Roscoe Nance
Florida A&M women’s tennis coach Nikki Houston (given name Rochelle Goldthreate) had a good feeling about her team prior to last month’s HBCU Championship. The Lady Rattlers had a good week of practice, and that was a good sign.
But Houston has been around long enough to understand that practice performances don’t always carry over to live competition. That wasn’t how it was in this instance, however. The Lady Rattlers played as well when it counted as they had in practice and won the title.
“Going in, I saw some opportunities for the girls because they were practicing well the week before,” Houston said. “But practice is different than when you’re playing. They got their first matches in, and you saw them doing well in their second matches, I thought it was an opportunity for us to bring that title home.
“The key was each individual player believing they could play well throughout practices leading up to the tournament. Everybody came in and worked hard. They jelled together. They were pushing each other. That had me a little bit more at ease coming into the tournament.”
But the coach in Houston wouldn’t allow her to dare think the Lady Rattlers would bring the championship trophy home with them, even though that was the goal.
“I don’t ever feel like we have it until the last day,” she said. “I just kinda go into each match each day. Maybe the night before, we knew what the points added. But it wasn’t until that last day that I knew we had it.”
The Lady Rattlers’ goal now is to build on the momentum and confidence they gained by winning the HBCU Championship. Their next match is Oct. 11 at Georgia Southern.
In the meantime, Houston says it’s back to basics for the team.
“It’s really kind of simple,” she said. “We played well this tournament. But there are a lot of things that we still need to work on. It did build our confidence, but each player feels like they can get better. We go back to the drawing board and each player will see what they need to work on and improve on. That’s what we continuously do. We know it’s a long season. This is just the fall, and we have until the spring. We have a lot of work to do.”
Houston says in addition to boosting the Lady Rattlers’ confidence, winning the HBCU Championship has created esprit de corps.
“The spirit has been lifted,” she said. “They saw what we can accomplish because we’ve seen a lot of teams that we might be playing in the MEAC Championship. They have come out in practice and realized that if we continuously keep pushing each other, we might have the opportunity to come out with the ultimate goal.”
That ultimate goal is winning the MEAC title. The HBCU Tournament field included conference rivals Bethune-Cookman, Morgan State (the 2018 MEAC champion) and North Carolina A&T State.
Florida A&M hasn’t won the conference crown since 1997.
Houston is optimistic this season’s Lady Rattlers can make significant strides towards ending their championship drought. She cites the improvement she has seen in the returning team members as positive signs. Rachel Harden and Haleigh Porter were First Team All-MEAC last season and Aylen Hubeaut won the B draw at the HBCU Tournament.
But Houston says winning a championship will require a total team effort.
“I know we’re an individual sport and you can always count on (Nos.) 1 and 2,” she said. “What I try to drill into my team is everybody is important from 1 through 6. We need everybody to count. I feel everybody has to put in their part for us to get to the ultimate goal.”
Even though the Lady Rattlers haven’t been much of a factor in the MEAC for more than two decades, the program has a proud legacy. Florida A&M alumna Althea Gibson was a pioneer in tennis in the 1950s, when she was among the first blacks to compete internationally.
Gibson was the first black athlete to win a Grand Slam tournament when she captured the 1956 French Open. She won 11 Grand Slams during her career, including Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals – the forerunner of the U.S. Open – both in 1957.
The United States Tennis Association honored Gibson, who died in 2003, for her many firsts last August, unveiling a granite sculpture of her outside the National Tennis Center at Flushing Meadows in Queens, N. Y., home of the U.S. Open.
Houston is honoring Gibson by bringing back the Althea Gibson Award that goes to a team member for outstanding tennis and academic accomplishments. Porter received the 2019 award.
‘It was an exciting and excellent thing for the USTA to acknowledge Althea for everything she did for the game of tennis,” Houston said. “We put high importance on that tradition and we make sure everybody knows you are walking on the porch of greatness, and it’s something you definitely have to show and bring every day when you come to practice and when we go out to compete you can be proud of knowing you are at FAMU and knowing Althea Gibson played on those courts”