UCSD’s LaPlante celebrating four decades as women’s tennis coach

The UC San Diego women’s tennis team was in the NCAA Division III national championship finals in the spring of 1989, and coach Liz LaPlante wasn’t going to miss it.

Her belly could not have been bigger as she anticipated the birth of her second child, a daughter, at any time.

The team finals were being held at Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Colleges east of Los Angeles, and LaPlante had a contingency hospital there in case she went into labor and there wasn’t time to get back to San Diego.

She didn’t need the backup plan.

On a Wednesday, the Tritons captured the third of their four Div. III titles under LaPlante with a victory over Ohio’s Kenyon College. LaPlante drove home Thursday and the next day delivered the baby.

“It made it memorable,” LaPlante recalled with a laugh.

One in an infinite number of memories.

As the UCSD women’s tennis season begins Friday with a home match against Nevada, the milestone years keep adding up for LaPlante. This season marks the 30th anniversary of the ’89 title team that included the school’s most accomplished player, Christine Behrens, and LaPlante has reached her 40^th year at the helm of the program.

No UCSD coach has been there longer, and few have had more success.

“I started out as a 21-year-old kid and I never expected I would be coaching here for 40 years,” LaPlante, 61, said on a recent sunny afternoon at the UCSD courts. “Life just keeps going by.”

In her time, LaPlante has produced impressive results.

She has a .666 winning percentage and 579 match wins overall. In all but five of her seasons, the Tritons have posted double-digit victory totals. La Plante’s teams qualified for the Div. III national championships 19 times, with the four titles and another five runner-ups.

In 1991, LaPlante’s peers selected her as the Division III Coach of … not the year, the entire decade of the 1980s.

The competition has been considerably tougher since UCSD moved to Div. II in 2000, and the Tritons don’t have a national title at that level. But LaPlante’s teams have still been highly competitive. They captured seven straight California Collegiate Athletic Association championships and strung together 65 straight conference victories.

In that time, while raising her three children, LaPlante juggled life as a mom (she pumped breast milk on road trips) and coach, but never once thought of quitting or going somewhere else.

“It was the perfect job,” she said.

LaPlante, who lives in Carlsbad, grew up in San Diego playing on the youth tennis circuit. After graduating from Clairemont High, she moved on to San Diego State, where she competed for the Aztecs while working on her undergrad and master’s degrees, finishing up on Montezuma Mesa in 1979.

A professor of hers at SDSU knew Judy Sweet, then the athletic director at UCSD. LaPlante interviewed for the women’s tennis coach opening and was hired. Her salary for the part-time job: a couple thousand dollars.

“I’d played tennis at SDSU in a Division I program,” LaPlante said. “I thought I knew everything. I think I was just naive enough to not know what I didn’t know. The program was in its infancy. It didn’t require someone to know what I have to know now.”

LaPlante found her feet quickly. UCSD reached the Div. III finals in two of the first six years of her tenure, and in 1985 the Tritons won their first national title.

The most memorable team likely was the 1989 championship squad. It was filled with a lively bunch of women who would remain close to LaPlante and each other for decades.

As Behrens, whose married name is Almeida, recalled, everybody on the team of women now in their 50s had a nickname that sticks to this day. They get together annually for an alumni weekend.

Behrens, selected into the first class of the UCSD Athletics Hall of Fame, was Yogi, and some of the others were TC (for team captain), Scrappy, Pokey, Tigger, Just Julie, and Rocky.

One player, Nancy Pouliquen, had a condition that made her hands sweaty, so they called her “Sweaty Hands Mama,” or SHM.

“She was self-conscious about it, and we just embraced it,” Almeida said. “And then she embraced it and wasn’t embarrassed. I had a rule, though. We would only high-five if we won a set.”

Another teammate, Carla Nicolas, acquired the moniker of “Hux” because a guy at a party said she was a ringer for the character Claire Huxtable from “The Cosby Show.”

Even LaPlante had a nickname. To this day, it is “Boo-tiful” because when the team was on a road trip and stopped for gas, a guy called LaPlante that while flirting with her.

“Liz was like a mother figure, but a peer, too. She wasn’t that much older than us,” said Almeida, 50, who won the Div. III singles title in 1990 and a doubles championship with Pouliquen (then Calhoun) in ’89. “Oh my gosh, she was so calm. And with tennis, it’s great to have a calm coach. Win or lose, she was so even.

“One funny thing is that our team would laugh all the time. And she would say, ‘If I hear another laugh, you guys have to run laps.’ Then she got some criers on teams after we left, and she told us she would give anything for the laughing again.”

For LaPlante, it was about creating something of a nurturing, comfortable bubble for the young women amid the pressures of school and life.

“I’ve just loved the girls,” LaPlante said. “It’s so much fun being around them, to see them have a great experience. That was my No. 1 goal — to give them the best experience they could have, to leave them feeling that college was a wonderful time for them.”

Considering wood rackets were still the tool of the trade when LaPlante started coaching, the tennis has certainly changed. It’s faster, more powerful, LaPlante said, with the players more focused on fitness and nutrition while also enduring enormous pressure with their studies.

Among the majors on LaPlante’s current team: bioengineering, biochemistry and cognitive science.

While many schools have turned to foreign talent to pad their rosters, LaPlante is proud that her teams are populated with San Diego and California athletes. This year’s squad, coming off a 13-11 season, features seven of nine in-state players including three locals — senior Ashley Chao (Rancho Bernardo), junior Valeria Corral (Mater Dei) and freshman Anu Bhadada (Torrey Pines).

“It’s a really tight group and they’re all super motivated,” LaPlante said. “They’re respectful of me and each other, and they’re pumped to start the season.”

Over 40 years, some things never change.

tod.leonard@sduniontribune.com; Twitter: @sdutleonard