Holding Court

In his 35 years as the women’s tennis coach at the College of Charleston, Angelo Anastopoulo has developed a lot of great players. Turns out, he also helped groom one of the most distinctive pop singers in recent memory, too. He and Darius Rucker, the lead singer of Hootie & the Blowfish, were in the same boys’ singing group, the Troubadours, at Charleston’s Middleton High School.

“My singing was so bad that Darius used to have to drown me out,” cracks Anastopoulo. “That’s the way he developed that voice.”

That light touch is a trademark of his coaching.

“He made everything so fun,” says former player Kate Earnhardt ’22. “On Valentine’s Day, he’d give roses, at Halloween, chocolate and costumes. And on court, when you were really nervous, he’d say something offbeat just to break the tension.”

When the College hired him at age 24 in 1991 after playing for The Citadel, he was so young, he couldn’t rent the team van. Now he’s the longest-tenured coach in the College’s history and one of Division I’s winningest in women’s tennis. With more than 600 career wins in the program (plus 172 as men’s coach from 1991 to 2001), he’s fourth among active coaches and ninth all-time in Division I.

Ask him what he loves about coaching and he’ll talk about teaching — literally. As an adjunct professor for 32 years, he’s introduced more than 3,000 beginners to the sport, which he calls “as rewarding as winning a conference championship.”

That dual lens is one reason he’s lasted so long. “I get a chance to see somebody hit a ball for the first time all the way to these elite athletes,” he says. “It keeps you young. There’s never a dull day.”

He also credits outstanding assistants (many now head or associate head coaches at Power Four programs), administrators who “took a risk on a young 24-year-old,” the guidance of predecessor Billy Silcox and the daily collaboration with men’s coach Jay Bruner. He’s grateful, too, for his wife, Paula, who came from an athletic family herself, and for the role models his players have been to his sons: Ted, pursuing a doctorate in history at Princeton, and Stratas, a tennis teaching pro at Seabrook Island.

He’s coached 13 sets of siblings and one mother-daughter combo. Marcy Cenkovich-Bruce, the mother of current CofC team member Marra Bruce, played on one of his first teams.

He relishes alumni visits (“Everybody remembers their time in college as being the best time of their lives,” he says) – and the life milestones that increasingly eclipse trophies: weddings, babies, careers taking off. He remembers the night in a Hampton Inn lobby in Johnson City, Tenn., when men’s team member Matt Czuchry ’99 asked whether to start law school or try acting.

“You can always go back to law school,” Anastopoulo told him. Czuchry is now a star of stage and screen — and, in his coach’s words, “one of the quickest and fiercest competitors we’ve ever had.”

One constant is the standard he set on Day 1, after calling his sister Patti, a member of Charleston’s first women’s tennis team in 1974. Her advice has been his North Star ever since: “Don’t mess it up.”

“For the last 35 years, that’s what I’ve been trying to do,” says Anastopoulo, “not mess it up.” – Tom Cunneff