University of West Florida
NCAA DII • GSC
Date: April 10, 2024
Would Recommend
Interesting to read these comments. As a parent from an athlete who also left this team last year, I echo these sentiments. Derrick the coach should not be in this role anymore. What coach does not come and watch trainings and take an active interest in the development of his players, he leaves it all up to his assistant coaches who are young ex-players from the team, not professional coaches. He is now more interested in running pickleball events than run a women's and men's tennis team. However, Didi the assistant coach at that time was very good and helped certainly with the team culture. I have heard that the current assistant coach Irene is a nightmare to deal with and has totally destroyed the team. There was a lack of professionalism, a lack of interest from coach. Imagine being on the team and your coach provides extra lessons to his top two players and ignores the rest. Imagine if you are from the US and you are on court and the team all speak Spanish to one another and you cannot understand a word and coach does nothing to step in and correct this. Imagine a coach stands right behind you on court whilst in a match and abuses you and says the most atrocious things. Imagine a team where they backstab each other and imagine other athletic teams within UWF think this team are awful. Even the UWF men's team see there are some serious problems within the women's team. The men's team suffer too, many quit tennis after the experience they encountered and still many suffer today. If you suck up to coach then you get privileges, is this the way a team should be run? Something needs to change, and that is, have a more balanced roster of players, become more diverse. Have an inspiring interested coach who is going to get results from their players by offering better trainings and better leadership and recruit better assistant coaches. The head of athletics at UWF needs to conduct an audit into the running of this team.