Sarah Borwell: The former pro supporting student-athlete dreams

From her stateside home in Washington D.C., Sarah Borwell spoke to Calacus candidly about her mission to support student-athletes to pursue both their academic and athletic dreams at every step, through her recently acquired agency – Tennis Smart.

In years gone by, talented young tennis players have had to choose between pursuing their tennis careers or remaining in education.

Ex-professional player Sarah Borwell has helped to shift that.

After retiring, Borwell, who attended the University of Houston before forging a successful career on the WTA Tour, founded an agency – Tennis Smart – to make hopeful tennis players and parents aware of the pathways and opportunities available to them.

The aim of Tennis Smart was to help a choice of two to become a choice of four, with promising talents able to now choose between the UK university system, the US college pyramid, staying in the tennis industry and going pro.

Former British no.1 Heather Watson has previously lamented the lack of support youngsters receive as they transition through the ranks, and expressed concerns at the funding policies and the politics within the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA).

In 2020, she said: “I think personally that more players need to get help rather than just helping your selected players, I don’t know how many there are, but a handful of players. I feel like there needs to be a bigger pool of support.

“That way you’re not spoiled and not given everything at a young age. You need to work for it, learn the grind and the hard work of the tour, what it takes. It would give more people the opportunity.”

Borwell completely agrees and is keen to stress the rigours of trying to make it as a professional tennis player, based on her own experiences: “The tour is hard. It was a really fun 10 years [for me], but it's a very, very hard kind of workplace to be in. And there's lots of other opportunities.

“I think I'd probably struggle now, just with the cost of everything. I was no.199 in the world and no.2 in Great Britain and I was about $15,000 in debt.

“Probably 0.01% are going to actually be good enough to go pro and maybe make any money on the tour. So that's kind of the beauty of going to college first. There's just all these pathways which are kind of exciting to highlight.”

Tennis Smart aims to remedy this by facilitating players along a progressive pathway that allows them to stay in education at every stage of their tennis development.

Borwell seeks to find and nurture young players and help them develop as people, as well as athletes, through their formative transitional years.

“I'll go around and do presentations to talk about the pathways and all the academic requirements you need. We also have brochures and webinars,” she says.

“Then once a player gets to 15 years old, we set up a zoom with them and talk through their academics and give them a clear pathway to make sure they don’t lose eligibility.

“Once GCSE's are over, that's when we tend to start a two-year process, because you've got to sit the entrance exam and create a recruiting video for colleges.

“You've also got to have time to compete and move your UTR [Universal Tennis Ranking] higher and we take them all the way through that placement process to make sure that they find the right fit for them.”

However, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the declining college-aged student population and impact of the pandemic have contributed to an evolving enrolment crisis in the US, with total undergraduate enrolment decreasing by 6.6 percent since autumn 2019.

This trend is expected to continue over the next decade, with many institutions potentially required to shift their recruitment focus, leaning more heavily on international student recruitment to sustain enrolment numbers.

Therefore, Borwell was naturally elated when she was approached by Keystone Education Group, an organisation with a huge educational platform.

The company acquired Tennis Smart as part of their long-term growth strategy focusing on student marketing and recruitment services, aiming to help rebuild the enrolment gap in the US and other markets internationally.

Headquartered in Oslo, Norway, Keystone is backed by Viking Venture and Verdane, two leading Nordic venture firms. With offices across the Nordics, Germany, and the UK, Keystone has an international staff of more than 550 employees.

They are trusted by more than 110 million unique prospective students every year and helps over 5000 educational institutions reach, recruit, and enrol prospective students in more than 190 countries, across 460 student websites, including Masterstudies.com, Bachelorstudies.com, Educations.com, Studentum.se, and FindAMasters.

She said: “[Keystone] wanted to get into the placement side of things and within a year they've grown so rapidly they bought six placement companies.

“I was really excited because their college network is as strong and as helpful as the placement support. So when players now come to us, they’re going to get some amazing placements and know where they are going.”

Keystone Sports – a division of Keystone Education Group – will shape a central part of this, with 63 employees in 7 countries, most of whom are former college student-athletes themselves, and agencies have sent over 9240 international student-athletes to over 820 Colleges in the US and Canada, securing over $582 million worth of scholarships.

Together they form Europe’s strongest college sports recruiting solution for student-athletes looking to study in the US and Borwell is optimistic about the potential of the partnership to redefine athlete placement and create a streamlined solution to the college enrolment crisis.

“Together with Uniexperts – the biggest company for tennis in Germany – and AGM, which is the biggest company in Spain – our bread and butter are tennis players. So the big thing now for us is how we can work together as one.

“Our first task is to make it as streamlined as possible for the [college] coaches, so then they always come to us for our players. Then players will see this and we'll grow from there.”

Together, they aim to keep doors open for young players instead of boxing them into the pressure cooker that is the road to pro.

This is not a new problem for junior tennis – for decades swathes of promising young talent have struggled to materialise their promise into success as senior players.

With a choice of two pathways – going pro or prioritising education and a career – naturally and understandably, the pressure to transition to playing at the top level has proved too much for many.

Borwell concludes: “We've all grown over the years, but now we're working together to change the face of placement and how it all works.

“At the end of the day we just want to make it simpler for the players, coaches, and parents.”

This process will result in Tennis losing less talent to other sports and will create a regenerative positive placement system, where players graduate while pursuing their individual athletic dreams, are encouraged to pursue the right pathway for them and then bring fresh talent back into the system later along the line.

Making every tennis hopeful aware of the four pathways –and how they can attack each of them – is vital to moving the game forward positively and constructively. 

Learn more about Sarah Borwell and Tennis Smart at https://tennissmart.net/