[StanfordMatt]

What was the issue in Axel's case?  Stresses of college coursework?  Or increase responsibilities of young adulthood?  Hopefully it wasn't coaching/skills issues...

I'm not in a poisition to judge but if I were to venture a guess, I'd say it was probably a combination of factors. First, as CT alluded to, junior rankings don't necessarily translate to D1 success. There's probably some differences between genders to this point as men/boys develop along different timelines than women/girls but examples from both genders seem to bear this out.

Second, for as great as the college experience may be for an individual's holisitic development, it's pretty clear imo that it's not ideal for developing the best tennis player possible. When I was loosely affiliated with the men's program many years ago, it was not uncommon to see Gould's players play their best tennis in their freshman year and then slowly go downhill from there. Whether this was attributable to SAE, academics, social stress or just no longer spending 8 hours on the court every day I couldn't say. For some reason, though, Amber Liu and Lele's gals didn't seem to have this problem lol. To Axel's credit, though, he was a 2x Academic All-American and the PAC-12 Scholar Athlete of the Year which is more important than success on the court, especially once it became apparent that he wasn't going to enjoy a serious professional career.

[StanfordMatt]

What was the issue in Axel's case?  Stresses of college coursework?  Or increase responsibilities of young adulthood?  Hopefully it wasn't coaching/skills issues...

I'm not in a poisition to judge but if I were to venture a guess, I'd say it was probably a combination of factors. First, as CT alluded to, junior rankings don't necessarily translate to D1 success. There's probably some differences between genders to this point as men/boys develop along different timelines than women/girls but examples from both genders seem to bear this out.

Second, for as great as the college experience may be for an individual's holisitic development, it's pretty clear imo that it's not ideal for developing the best tennis player possible. When I was loosely affiliated with the men's program many years ago, it was not uncommon to see Gould's players play their best tennis in their freshman year and then slowly go downhill from there. Whether this was attributable to SAE, academics, social stress or just no longer spending 8 hours on the court every day I couldn't say. For some reason, though, Amber Liu and Lele's gals didn't seem to have this problem lol. To Axel's credit, though, he was a 2x Academic All-American and the PAC-12 Scholar Athlete of the Year which is more important than success on the court, especially once it became apparent that he wasn't going to enjoy a serious professional career.