The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Minor’s major feat is now tennis history
Michigan star is first black woman to win an NCAA singles title.
The woman wearing maize and blue celebrated her moment in Athens knowing she had made history, but not quite knowing the full extent of the story.
When Brienne Minor’s opponent’s forehand down the line finally floated long, there was simply a joyful, graceful tossing of her racket into the air, a double fistpump at shoulder level and a single clap in front of her chest. Then off to the net to shake hands. She kept her head down for the first few steps – best not to smile too big in front of the runner-up.
Minor had always been quiet and humble, the third in a line of college-tennis-playing sisters from Mundelein, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. But if she ever had a reason to lose her composure, to rip the neatly knotted bun at the nape of her neck loose and really go berserk, it would have been on that muggy Monday last month in Georgia when Minor captured the NCAA singles title and became Michigan’s first national champion in the sport.
That accounts for History Made: Part One. The sequel is a doozy. The 19-year-old is the first African-American woman to win the NCAA singles championship. She is the first black player to win the singles title since Arthur Ashe in 1965.
“I didn’t even realize it until my sister said something to me a couple days later,” Minor said. “It’s such an honor, and I hope I can be a good role model for other African-American tennis players, because there’s not a lot in this game.”
Nor has there ever been, despite superstars Venus and Serena Williams and their countrywomen Madison Keys, Sloane Stephens and Taylor Townsend holding down American women’s tennis in the pros. In the collegiate ranks, just 354 of 8,591 female tennis players during the 2015-16 season were black. That’s 4.1 percent across all three divisions, excluding historically black colleges and universities.
At first, Minor, her family and her coaches were too consumed by her run through the tournament to consider the improbable odds.
Minor was tired, physically and emotionally, following her two-week sojourn in Athens, which included the team tournament. As an unseeded sophomore in the individual event, she won six matches in six days. She had already toppled two top-16 seeds by the time she got to the championship match on May 29. There, she defeated No. 6 Belinda Woolcock, from Florida’s powerhouse program, 6-3, 6-3.
It wasn’t until dinner a few hours later that her father, Kevin Minor, grew curious about other black women who had won the singles title.
He held off telling Minor until he and Michigan coach Ronni Bernstein confirmed his initial look. Then one of his older daughters told Minor over the phone.
“I didn’t want to talk about it with a bunch of people if that wasn’t the case,” Kevin Minor said. “I was in a little bit of disbelief that, here it is, 2017, and there wasn’t someone else. I didn’t want to make it bigger than it was, I didn’t want to make this all of a sudden a more monumental occasion if it wasn’t true. But for us, it’s a big deal.”
Family passion
To a young Brienne Minor, tennis was simply what her family did. Her passion for the game was passed down from her maternal grandfather, who picked up tennis in parks in Indianapolis at a time when blacks were barred from the country clubs that held lessons and tournaments. The USTA, then known as the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association, held a policy that banned blacks from playing in its championships, including the U.S. Open, until the 1950s.
Yet James Minnefield passed his love of the sport onto his children, and Minor’s mother Michelle passed it on to her daughters.
Before Brienne was old enough to play tournaments, she was being toted along as big sister Kristina and middle sister Jasmine competed on the USTA juniors circuit, which demands year-round travel.
By the time she was 5, Brienne began playing competitively just like her older sisters. They planned what would happen were they ever to face one another in a Grand Slam, and talked of being the next Williams sisters. “We were serious!” Brienne said. “Well, it was kind of a joke but also definitely serious.”
Tough schedule
Soon, lessons, trainers, tournaments and travel dominated life so much that Kevin Minor had to resort to putting the five family members’ schedules into a spreadsheet. When travel was heaviest, the father worked remotely from tournament sites. Both parents shifted schedules as often as they could to account for tennis lessons 45 minutes away from home. Tennis played a part in where the girls went to high school – a private Catholic school that didn’t require a P.E. class every semester, like the public schools did.
When she was 13, Minor so yearned for a reprieve for her jam-packed schedule and travel demands she thought about giving up tennis.
Although tennis wielded an unbreakable power, academics were also held at a premium in the Minor household. Report cards, though they come electronically now, are printed out and stuck to the fridge to this day.
“The goal (with tennis) that we had was, at a minimum – just because of the time and money that you put into it – the minimum was to have a full-ride college scholarship at a good university at the end,” Kevin Minor said. “Anything after that was a dream and a bonus.”
The Minor sisters were an anomaly at the higher ranks of the junior circuit. Kevin Minor can’t remember a national tournament where there were more than two or three black faces aside from his daughters in a 64or 128-player draw. On the circuit, neither overt racism — nor the seedier kind that lurks beneath cordiality but cuts just as deep — was an issue for the family. But his daughters were often out there alone, so he gave them a speech anyway:
“Know who you are. Be proud of who you are. Some things you might ignore, but other things you have to speak out about.”
For Brienne, the overwhelming whiteness of tennis was simply a reality. Serena Williams’ fame reached a fever pitch and the upper echelon of American women’s tennis grew dotted with women who looked more like her, but in Minor’s dayto-day life, she remained one of few.
“I’ve just been used to it, I’ve just been playing tennis for so long,” Minor said of the lack of minority participation in the sport. “I’ve been traveling, I’ve been to a lot of places in the U.S., I’ve seen a lot of girls at tournaments, and you just don’t see African-Americans that often. But I’m so used to it, I don’t even think about it that much unless someone brings it up to me. It’s still kind of the same in college.”
Tennis’s progress in attracting, nurturing and retaining minority players has been incremental at best.
That black women make up 4.1 percent of collegiate tennis players (excluding HBCUs) is a bump from 3.7 percent in 2011-12 and 2 percent in the 1999-2000 season, when Venus and Serena Williams first appeared together in the top 10 of the pro rankings.
The numbers are worse for men’s tennis, which has fewer scholarships than the women’s side. Of the 7,842 male college players in 201516, just 218 were black. That’s 2.8 percent, barely up from 2.3 percent in 2011-12 and 1.6 percent in the 1999-2000 season.
For Minor, the question of diversity in tennis gives her pause.
“I’m really proud, tennis is everything to me,” Minor said. “And I am pretty young, but I hope one day I can be a role model just for younger girls, younger players looking up to somebody. I hope I can send that message that anyone can do it, it doesn’t matter what race you are.”