New men's tennis coach focuses on fitness as season begins

The men's varsity tennis team and new head coach Billy Boykin will start the fall season Friday with the Navy Invite Tournament at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

The tournament will be an opportunity for the Richmond team, which is young this year, to get match play and start gaining some experience, said Boykin, who came to Richmond from the College of Charleston in South Carolina.

"We'll head up on Thursday," he said. "It's a really strong tournament -- Navy, Maryland, Arkansas and Oklahoma. ... It's sort of trial by fire."

For the team's five freshmen, the tournament might be especially tough, but Boykin said for his first couple years he would focus on improving the team's play rather than winning tournaments.

"We're going to focus on development," he said. "It's more than Ws and Ls; it's about getting better."

One of Boykin's plans to further develop the team includes a strong focus on fitness, conditioning and strength. When fall practices began, he gave the team some baseline fitness tests, and he will continue to run the tests until the results meet his standards, he said.

Boykin has also increased the involvement of Jay DeMayo, the team's strength and conditioning coach.

Since Aug. 4, when Boykin arrived on campus, he's been hard at work preparing this season's schedule, contacting recruits and working with his team. Although he said he had been scrambling around quite a bit, the people around him noted his high energy.

"I'd compare him to a young football coach," senior David Berry said. "He's really rolled up his sleeves and got to work. He's a good motivator and he's definitely motivated, himself."

Boykin spent his collegiate career at Davidson College and earned a degree in political science. After Davidson, he worked in finance for about three years before going to Europe for five to six months, and then back to Davidson for the start of his collegiate coaching career, he said.

"I worked with great people who were really passionate about what they did," Boykin said about his finance job, "and that's when I realized that it just wasn't the field for me.

"So I went to Madrid and taught English."

Once he returned from Europe he was "really charged for teaching and coaching," he said.

His experience at Davidson, both playing and coaching, is what really attracted the Richmond athletics staff to Boykin's application, said LaRee Sugg, an assistant athletic director.

After the tennis team's coach left last December, department of athletics employees hired an interim coach to serve until summer when it would be easier to find a full-time head coach.

The applicant pool was more competitive than she was prepared for, Sugg said.

"We had M.D.s, J.D.s, Ph.D.s, head coaches, assistant coaches, people working at Applebee's and people with lots of collegiate coaching experience," she said.

Sugg liked Boykin's familiarity with Davidson because its set up is similar to Richmond's. She thought Boykin would understand the experience of the student-athlete at Richmond and the necessary balance between academics and athletics.

Not only did Boykin understand what it would mean to be an athlete at Richmond, he understood the challenges of coaching. Like Davidson, Richmond is a small school, so coaches here have to be flexible and sympathetic to the academic rigors and scheduling challenges caused by limited class times, she said.

Boykin's transition to Richmond has been great, he said. The department of athletics has been very supportive and helpful, he said, and he has gotten right to work getting freshmen players some experience.

The team's fall schedule has been recently finalized and will include four tournaments, the last of which stretches almost a week in mid-October. Later in the year, Boykin predicted the team would play University of North Carolina Charlotte, where his father Jim Boykin has been the head coach for 14 years.

"He's a dinosaur," Boykin said. "He's coached me as a player, an assistant coach and now a head coach. Hopefully he doesn't pull out any tricks on me."

Contact staff writer Jacki Raithel at jacki.raithel@richmond.edu