Craig Tiley, the new head of U.S. tennis, and an undefeated college season in Illinois

In 1993, a graduate student with little experience in college tennis coaching walked into Ron Guenther’s office at the University of Illinois. He set down a binder with a plan for the men’s team on the athletic director’s desk, and made a statement that sounded completely absurd.

“I said that before the next 10 years are out, we will be number one in the nation. We will win a national title. We will be winning the Big Ten every year,” Craig Tiley, the new chief executive of the U.S. Tennis Association, said during a recent interview.

“I think he was thinking that I was crazy.”

By all rights, that’s exactly what Guenther should have been thinking. At the time, Illinois was a college tennis backwater. Reaching double digits in wins was a good season for the men’s team. The Big Ten, the pinnacle of competition, sounded like a distant dream.

In 1992, Guenther had asked Tiley, then a part-time community coach at the university tennis center, to take over the team on an interim basis after the head coach had left. It didn’t go well.

Tiley led the team to 4-23 record. A bunch of players quit. Tiley had to beg the football coach to borrow some athletes to fill out the roster and complete the season. The team went 0-10 in the Big 10 and finished last in the conference.

But by the time Tiley left Illinois, he had fulfilled every promise he had made to Guenther. Within four years, Tiley’s team won the Big Ten Conference title. Then it won it every year until Tiley left, after the 2005 season. In 2003, the team ran the table, finishing a perfect 32-0 and winning the NCAA team title, as well as the individual singles and doubles championships.

Three decades on, Tiley still refers to the 13 seasons he spent in Urbana-Champaign as the formative experience of his professional life. That’s coming from the guy who would go on to transform the Australian Open from a relative outlier among the Grand Slams into the most dynamic and innovative major tournament in the sport.

Now the question is whether Tiley can stimulate another level of success for the USTA, a fragmented organization with a mixed reputation for efficiency. The U.S. Open, its signature event, is a juggernaut, with annual revenues of more than $500 million and the largest purse of the four Grand Slams.

But despite great success in women’s tennis, the organization also hasn’t helped produce a men’s Grand Slam winner in more than two decades. Recent chief executives have struggled to unite the parent organization with its 17 geographical sections, which can upset the balance between professional development and community tennis.

Now it has handed the reins to Tiley, the outgoing leader of Tennis Australia and the Australian Open, the posts he is most closely associated with. It’s a risky move. Tiley was a king in Australia, where the Australian Open is a dominant sporting event. Fighting for attention in the vast and crowded American sports landscape can be a hornet’s nest. Also, the U.S. Open is already ridiculously successful.

It’s not really a candidate for transformation like the men’s tennis program at the University of Illinois 33 years ago. But the success Tiley had there is the bedrock of his earned reputation as one of the more creative leaders in tennis, someone who seeks out risk and can deliver transformation.

For many of his former players, Tiley’s voice, lessons and habits he instilled linger in their heads decades later whether they like it or not.

“We had dry-erase boards in our lockers, and daily goals had to be written down before practice, and also monthly and yearly goals,” Cary Franklin, who won a national title in doubles in 2000, said during a recent interview. “I’m nearly 50 and I’ve still got my board with my daily goals.”

Michael Kosta, the comedian and rotating host of “The Daily Show” who played for Tiley at Illinois, remembers those goals well.

“We had to have three every day,” he said. “Without three we would run.”

Tiley’s landing in the Illini tennis program was largely down to happenstance. He had been a lower-level pro in the 1980s, before enrolling in a professional coaching and management program at Tyler Junior College. He did some coaching there and became familiar with the work of several top coaches in the U.S., including Vic Braden and Dennis Van der Meer, another South African.

In 1993 he moved up to Illinois to pursue a doctoral degree in sports psychology and physiology — two areas of study that he wanted to research in tandem. To support himself once he arrived, he began teaching at the university tennis center, which is a public facility.

Then the men’s head coach quit. Guenther asked Tiley to fill in, and before long he was developing his 10-year-plan for success.

“It’s a lot of fun when you see a young person work really hard and then achieve results through sport,” Tiley said. “I just got a kick out of that, and I got a kick out of the team element, and probably my biggest kick is proving people wrong.”

Plenty of people told Tiley he had no chance of success at Illinois. They told him the sport was poorly funded. They told him how it had been years since Illinois had been competitive nationally. He told them he was going to win a national title.

Saying that and doing it are very different. But Tiley had a plan.

First he needed to set a tone of seriousness. He made Illinois tennis players work as they had never worked before. He got them up at 5 a.m. to run on cold winter mornings. He had them doing weight sessions in the gym. He made practices hurt. Before long everyone who wasn’t serious about the endeavor had quit.

He learned very quickly that recruiting the top juniors would be a waste of time. They wouldn’t give him the time of day. They were all headed to the traditional powers — Stanford, Georgia, USC, UCLA, Florida and other warm-weather schools.

That was fine with him. He focused on the next tier, juniors ranked between No. 30 and No. 100 in the country. In 1996, Franklin was one of them. At the National Clay Court Championships, he faced the highly touted Michael Russell in the quarterfinals. Russell, who now coaches Taylor Fritz, was the top-ranked junior in the U.S..

Franklin pushed him to three sets, fighting hard to the end.

When it was over, Tiley approached.

“He said, ‘There are 60 coaches watching that match who want Russell to play for them. I want you,’” Franklin recalled. Tiley told Franklin he had the talent to be one of the best college players in the country. “He said, ‘Come to Illinois and I will make you great.’”

Tiley went a step further, though. Franklin had a reputation as one of the feistiest juniors in the country, a brat with a big ego and a big mouth. Everyone was always trying to make him behave better.

Tiley told Franklin he liked him just the way he was. “Don’t change,” he said. “We need some swagger.”

Tiley didn’t go after beautiful tennis players. Illinois played tons of matches on fast, indoor hard courts. He went after big guys who could crack a big serve, work their way into the court and finish points at the net. He figured he and his assistant, Bruce Berque, now the longtime head coach at Texas, could teach them most of what else they needed to know.

Tiley discovered another secret weapon in recruiting. In the 1990s, a lot of college tennis coaches began to focus a lot of their recruiting efforts internationally. Tiley didn’t like that approach and decided he wanted to focus only on Americans, including at least one from Illinois, an odd choice for an immigrant.

He had his reasons, and they made an impression on his recruits.

“You would go on these recruiting trips and you would have these kind of pockets when there were a lot of different nationalities on the team,” Michael Calkins, a decent but unspectacular player from the Pacific Northwest who visited several warm-weather school before deciding on Illinois, said during an interview.

“It didn’t feel like a team. It felt more like pods, your two or three friends that you would hang out with and stick together. Three pods formed a team. In Illinois, when I went there, it was kind of all just one big team.”

Tiley also became known for his obsessive attention to detail. Players had to travel wearing ties, khakis and blue blazers. If they stayed with a family on the road they had to write a handwritten thank-you note.

The team would gather in December to write Christmas cards to contributors. After a recruit visited, they received handwritten notes from current players.

Sometimes he could go overboard. Players had to arrive to practice clean-shaven. A sloppy face meant a sloppy life and sloppy play. Tiley has been forced to reconsider this one, given Novak Djokovic’s success at his Australian Open with scruff on his cheeks and chin.

“I was building a team and back then needing some form of conformity was important,” Tiley wrote in a text message of his facial hair rule.

Kosta, who once was told to not bother showing up to practice the next day unless he shaved, said he has found there can be a dark side to intensely driven people like Tiley. Tiley could be too intense. Kosta might miss an easy overhead during a match and see Tiley getting ready to throw his clipboard.

Eventually he had to ask for Berque to coach him during matches, rather than Tiley. When Kosta chose to become an assistant coach at the University of Michigan, a Big Ten rival, Tiley didn’t speak to him for five years.

Tiley remains one of the most important figures in Kosta’s life, the voice that is always telling him to push harder, to check the spelling and grammar on his text messages. When Kosta was banging around the lower tiers of pro tennis in his first years after college, he picked up his phone one morning and saw a voicemail from Tiley.

Tiley told him he’d been watching a comedian on television the night before. He told Kosta he was far funnier and ought to move to Los Angeles and become a comedian.

“And look where I am,” he said. “I’m a comedian.”

Kosta was part of the teams that began Tiley’s run of nine consecutive Big Ten titles and helped lay the groundwork for the national championship team. They were the ones that allowed Tiley to go on recruiting trips and show prospects where his players were ranked before they came to Illinois and where he helped them get to. That helped him land blue-chip recruits like Amer Delić, a son of Bosnian refugees who grew up in Florida, and Rajeev Ram, now a six-time Grand Slam champion in doubles.

Delić, who was the country’s third-ranked junior behind Andy Roddick and Robby Ginepri, almost left Illinois during his freshman year. He broke his wrist playing pick-up basketball with his teammates on the last day of the fall semester. Tiley had prohibited them from playing basketball for just this reason. That rule violation, combined with a teammate’s poor grades, resulted in a month straight of 5 a.m. runs in the local armory.

During the spring, still not 100 percent and still feeling bad about his injury, he kept losing deciding matches. He went to Tiley’s office and told him he was thinking of heading back to Florida. Tiley told him the team believed him and they would get through this. Delić won the national title in 2003, capping off Illinois’ perfect season.

“He knew how to communicate with everyone but in different ways,” Delic said during a recent interview.

After that perfect season — which just one team has achieved since, Wake Forest in 2025 — there wasn’t much left for Tiley to accomplish in college tennis. He’d proved all his rivals wrong.

The coaches who told him he could never win at Illinois were now the butt of his practical jokes. When he would see them at restaurants for team dinners during tournaments, he would send them birthday desserts, complete with candles and singing waiters and waitresses.

The following season, UCLA defeated the top-seeded Illini in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament. During spring break in 2005, Evan Zeder, a senior who played in the back of the lineup, found himself shooting the breeze with the coach who taught him the importance of taking risks, on and off the tennis court. The conversation turned to what Zeder might do next, after graduation.

“He said he was thinking about the same thing,” Zeder recalled in a recent interview.

“He could have gone down as a great coach. That was too safe for him.”