All-American Venise Chan Cherishes Teamwork, Studies, Tennis Excellence Before Home Finale
April 1, 2011
By Gregg Bell
UW Director of Writing
SEATTLE - Venise Chan arrived at UW from her native Hong Kong four years ago in search of supreme competition, unique team camaraderie and challenging academics.
She's smoothly and steadily handled all three - to become one of the best players in UW history.
"It's been a great experience," Chan, the 2010 All-American, budding businesswoman and potential professional tennis player, said before 25th-ranked Washington's final home match of the season Saturday at 11 a.m. Pacific time against 46th-ranked Sacramento State. "When I first came here, I only knew individual tennis in Asia. I came here and I learned team tennis. It's a life skill.
"It's something most companies will look for - do you work well with others, with a team? I think that's the best thing I've gotten out of college."
That, and some outstanding tennis results.
With 94 singles wins and counting, Chan ranks third all-time at UW in career wins. She has been the only woman named to the All-Pac-10 first team and Pac-10 All-Academic first team the last two seasons. At home she's been almost perfect, going 34-3 in singles play in her Huskies career.
Chan has consistently ranked in the top 25 nationally the past two years, with a high point of No. 9. Last year, Chan was one of just five players to make at least the round of 16 at all three national individual tournaments.
Sure, she could have stayed home and stayed great individually in Hong Kong. After all, she was excellent enough to return home to represent her country in last fall's Asian Games. She played against professionals such as eventual bronze medalist Sania Mirza of India, in front of huge crowds in a giant stadium in Guangzhou, China.
But she sought a higher challenge in the United States. And she got it -- after being so impressed by Huskies coach Jill Hultquist while meeting her at the U.S. Open as a junior player that she packed up, moved across the Pacific Ocean and left her family behind in 2007 without even visiting the UW campus.
"Jill's really great," Chan said, giggling and shrugging while seated on a couch in the lobby of Washington's Nordstrom Tennis Center after practice on Thursday.
Chan arrived and instantly became Huskies' No. 1 singles player as a freshman. She then went 15-6 in the top spot, defeating nine opponents who were ranked nationally, in one of the best freshman seasons in school history.
Surprising those who didn't know the soft-spoken, 5-foot-3 Chan's tennis, she basically bullied opponents with a relentlessly attacking game that is rare among U.S. college players who generally sit back and passively wait for their opponents to make mistakes. That aggressive on-court nature has since become Chan's UW trademark.
She became the first Husky of any class in three years to compete at the NCAA tennis championships that freshman year.
But in 2009, heralded recruit Denise Dy arrived from San Jose, Calif., and eventually replaced Chan as UW's No. 1 singles player.
Chan met that challenge like she meets all others: Head on.
She led the Dawgs back to the NCAA Round of 16 in `09, clinching UW's upset of USC in the NCAA second round with a third-set tiebreak win over Maria Sanchez, currently the top-ranked player in the country.
And she befriended Dy, to the point the two are now roommates in an off-campus apartment. Instead of resenting each other, they became UW's powerful top doubles team - until Hultquist recently split them up to better balance the competitiveness of the Huskies' other doubles entries.
"She's a great player. She helps me," Chan said of Dy. "Plus, playing all year at No. 1 (where she often is relied upon to pull out team wins in a day's final match) is a tough job.
"I mean, I would like to play No. 1. I have played it a few times this season. But it doesn't matter in the end. Like I said, college tennis is about teamwork."
But ask her how often she would beat Dy if she played her roommate 10 times, Chan smiles and shows her pride.
"She's never beaten me in a real match," Chan says. "In here (Wednesday), she beat me by two points in one game, then I won the next game. We know each other's game so well, we know where each other is going, our games in practice usually end up 5-5."
Chan feels the urgency of these final days of her college career, before she graduates with a marketing degree in June and heads home to Hong Kong to pursue professional tennis and that business career.
"Especially this last year, I've been thinking it's going to end soon," Chan said, speaking softly again. "I've been playing like it's my last match, going 100 percent, all out."
That's really, really bad news for Sacramento State right now.
