There was a time when opting to play college tennis in the US was perceived as giving up on a professional career in the sport, recalls Tunisian Skander Mansouri, who captained Wake Forest to the NCAA team title last year.

But now, the college tennis route is becoming a lifeline for many promising Arab players with limited pathways to the pros back home.

Mansouri, a 24-year-old from Tunis, is enjoying an encouraging first full year on the professional circuit after graduating from North Carolina’s Wake Forest University with a degree in mathematical business in 2018. He recently hit a career-high ranking of 303 in the world after picking up six ITF titles within the last 12 months.

Egyptian Mayar Sherif also made an impressive transition from college tennis to the pro tour this season. The Pepperdine alum – a semi-finalist in the NCAA singles championship last year – rocketed up the WTA rankings in 2019, going from being unranked to inside the top 200 within the span of 10 months (only three women have achieved that feat this season on the women’s professional circuit).

Both Mansouri and Sherif were talented teens ranked in the top 50 in the world junior rankings. And while they would have liked to pursue a professional tennis career at a younger age, they found the college tennis route to be the smartest option and their decision to study in the United States is now paying dividends.

“You want to play tennis professionally, that’s what you grow up dreaming about,” Mansouri told the Guardian in a phone interview.

“Back in Tunisia, people saw going to college and playing tennis there as a loss or a defeat because you chose not to go on the tour.

“For years, people were talking about me here like I quit playing tennis or something; like I wasn’t playing tennis anymore.”

But with the kind of success Mansouri was having with Wake Forest, people back home began to take notice, and it encouraged more Tunisian players to follow suit.

“People started seeing it differently and I see that young people in Tunisia want to go to college way more than before and I think that should be the case, especially for us in Arab countries,” explained Mansouri.

According to NCAA records, 36 Arab student-athletes played Division I tennis in 2018, with an additional 18 taking part in Division II. Participation numbers have been steadily increasing over the last few years.

Developing talented juniors into competitive pros has always been an achilles heel for most Arab nations that lack the resources and have no proper systems in place to guide teenagers to the next level in tennis. College tennis is now seen as a refuge for many young players from the region looking to harness their skills and gain competitive experience, all while receiving proper education.

“There isn’t that transition from juniors to the pros [in our Arab countries]. A lot of people get lost in that space and they just don’t know how to go about it,” says Omar Abdo, a Saudi Arabian senior playing college tennis at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut.

“College tennis is like another chance for us. It’s another entry way to pro life or to continue playing the sport at a high level. Because if you stay in your country and go to college there, you’re going to play with the same two people – at least that’s the case in my situation in Saudi.”

For Sherif, college tennis was the only option for her after finishing high school in Cairo. After cracking the top 50 in the world junior rankings at the age of 16, she stopped competing in junior events because she couldn’t afford the travel and had to cut short her stay at an academy in Alicante, Spain for similar financial constraints. She ended up joining her sister in Fresno State University, before transferring to Pepperdine.

“I enjoyed team competition, I learnt a lot about tactics because your coach is sitting with you on court the whole time, which doesn’t happen on the ITF circuit,” says the 23-year-old Sherif.

“But the biggest difference is you get to learn maturity, responsibility, time management – especially that my major was a tough major and Pepperdine is a tough school. I studied sports medicine so I was taking the base of medicine classes and it wasn’t easy at all.

“In college, the best things you learn are personal things, how to deal with people, when things are going bad, how to put on a good face and deal with people in a good way. When things aren’t going well you still go to practice, when you’re struggling every day and you have exams, you still go to practice and give 100%. These things help you evolve as a person. When you eventually get to the WTA, where all you have to do is focus on tennis, it feels so easy.”

Mansouri also considers time management to be one of the most important things he learned during his time at Wake Forest, as well as “accountability” which he says has now come in handy while he’s grinding on the professional circuit, flying solo and taking care of every aspect of his career himself. The North African believes a huge advantage of playing for a school like Wake was that “every resource is provided to you in college to make it”.

“I mean my coach was there in college and I promise you I could go practice at any time I’d like. I could go for a team practice and then if I wanted to do individual practice from midnight to 3am, he’ll be there with me from midnight to 3am,” he added. “The only challenge is obviously not to lose sight of your goals when you go there because you have a lot of things to worry about, so obviously you can get lost. But if you’re determined, you have every resource for you to make it. And I think it’s a beautiful experience whether you make it or not and I think it increases your chances of making it.”

With the average age of tennis players at the top of the professional game increasing each year – the world’s top three are aged 33, 32 and 38 respectively – there is no longer a sense of urgency among teenagers to leap onto the professional tour immediately.

“I look at it in a way where I think tennis now is becoming a sport where maturity is very important and you can see it in the top 100, the average age is close to 30 and I think you have plenty of time to go mature in college, face a lot of different situations, know yourself better, learn how to manage your time, learn a lot of things about yourself and then go on the tour; I think it gets you ready for the tour. That’s what my experience showed me,” says Mansouri.

Kareem Allaf, a 21-year-old Syrian who is a senior at University of Iowa, believes he wouldn’t have survived the ITF tour had he turned pro straight after high school. One of two Arabs ranked in the top 60 of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) Rankings at the moment – alongside Lebanon’s Hady Habib of Texas A&M – Allaf says he was neither physically nor mentally prepared to compete professionally at such a young age, and is grateful he took the decision to go to college instead.

“We play matches every single weekend. It’s just the match play. There’s a lot of great players in college. So it’s just mental toughness week by week, that kind of teaches you a little bit of what it’s like on tour,” Allaf explains.

Abdo, who won’t pursue a professional career after graduating from Sacred Heart, also cites the constant match play as the most appealing part of his college tennis experience.

“It extended my playing time, because I didn’t want to stop and I knew I wasn’t going to go pro. So that was my only way to keep playing at a level that I’m happy with and keep practicing every day,” said the Saudi Arabian. “It’s the best thing. It’s a blessing.”

Of the 110 Arabs on record who have played Division I tennis in college over the past three years, 41 are Egyptian. Alexandria native, Nada Zaher, who played tennis at Columbia University and graduated in 2016, founded a company in Egypt called Pass-sport that helps connect international athletes with college coaches and guides students through the process of pursuing an athletic scholarship at universities in the US. Zaher says she owes everything to tennis, not least because it helped her get into her dream school.

“I didn’t know what to expect when I went to Columbia, and then I went and I found an incredible system, everything is offered to the athletes. Tutors, career counseling, physical therapy, nutritionist, mental toughness, fitness coach. I went there from Egypt feeling everything was so random, I used to get lazy sometimes, and suddenly I’m in this perfect system,” says Zaher.

In her company’s first year, Zaher has helped send 17 Egyptian student-athletes to colleges in the States, six of which are tennis players.

“Especially in countries like Egypt, where there is really no system, you get to go to college that has a perfect system and offers you everything possible to put you on the right track and they’ll push your career to become a pro,” states Zaher. “You really mature as an athlete. A 16-year-old tennis player is not mature at all, how they’re managing their behavior on court, how they deal with wins and losses, all that stuff is not something you learn when you’re 16.

“I think the team aspect, even though tennis is an individual sport, playing in a team and managing all that stuff I think it really helps you mature as a player overall.

“And it gets you used to the habit of following a strict regimen, getting used to discipline, which is something we lack where we’re from. Everything is offered to you, versus here in Egypt, if you stay, you’re going to grind like crazy and you might burn out a lot earlier. And if you cannot maintain a college spot, forget maintaining your level professionally, so it’s a really good test for your limits.”

With success stories like Mansouri and Sherif providing a template for aspiring players in the Arab world, receiving a college education and advancing one’s tennis career are no longer mutually exclusive. Surely many more are expected to follow in their footsteps.