To close the 40th Anniversary celebration of UC Santa Cruz Athletics, we spoke to former tennis Coach Bob Hansen, the man responsible for some of the biggest moments in school history.

In Coach Hansen's 31 years (1980-2011) at UC Santa Cruz, his teams won seven NCAA Championships, three ITA Indoor Championships and produced 118 All-Americans. He's currently the head coach at Middlebury University, who won the 2018 NCAA Title to make him the most decorated coach ever in Division III Tennis.

Goslugs.com: I guess to start it off we could ask how did you start that culture?

Hansen: Well, so there was a club team when I first got there. They were people who loved playing tennis. So my first couple years at UCSC, I was teaching full time, but I was also working on getting my master's degree.

I went to the director of OPERS at the time (Phil Jones) and said, 'You know, We need to join the NCAA or I'm going to go somewhere where I can start a team' because, in terms of my training, I was probably way more qualified as a tennis coach than I was as a PE teacher.

So then he said, 'How much does it cost to join the NCAA?' I think I made the call and found out that it was $500 to join the NCAA back then as a minimum membership. I don't know what even a "minimum membership" was, like six teams or something for men and women was the least you could join.

Cris Bacharach (the program's and school's first All-American) came in, and that was the first year we're in the NCAAs. He had a great run and put us in the top 10 based on his results alone that first year. Cris was the first real recruit and basically we went into that season with Chris and a bunch of guys from the club team.

But in a couple years, we started getting more players who came to Santa Cruz because they wanted to get better and we're really hungry. We were lucky we got a lot of good athletes who decided to concentrate on tennis in college.

It's definitely hard to build a culture and a program. They put enough roadblocks in front of you that makes it hard. I think if they lifted some of those, you guys are in many ways the best position you've been in.

I mean now you're paying a living wage for coaches, which was never the case when I was there.

What were all these roadblocks, and what was the support system in the early days like?

Yeah, good question. 

There was so little oversight for anything back then, you know?

We didn't really have a Director of Athletics. We had no sports information, no trainer. It was just about playing. it was just easy, nobody got in our way, nobody supported us. Our budget back then was $1,000 for the entire year. It didn't even cover balls; we had to raise money for everything.

 Nobody ever said, 'You can't practice here. You can't do this, can't do that.' And so it was easy in some ways, obviously hard in other ways.

A lot of the challenges were around never knowing if somebody was going to get in until everybody else found out. By that time, unless the person was super committed to coming there, they would have gone somewhere else.

I still remember the first time I went to admissions and just said 'can you just tell me if this guy has any chance of getting in?' And they looked at me like, "get out of here! We're looking at a million applications and we could care less about you' and so I was kind of like, 'I'm gonna have to wait until March and find out like everybody else.'

It's funny. There are a lot of things that I think back that I could have done better, because to be honest, I teach in the entire year here at Middlebury less PE than I taught in two weeks at Santa Cruz.

When I was at Santa Cruz, I was a full-time PE teacher, and then I did coaching on top of that. So, that was a challenge to teach all morning long. Sometimes I would teach racquetball and basketball, then have lunch, plan practice.

The next day, I would do two or three tennis classes in the morning and then have lunch and then plan practice. It was just a different thing.

That was another thing in those early days: when the courts were first put in. You know where that big retaining wall is right outside the main building? That's where the tennis courts were, right at the entryway was the retaining wall and you'd come down from the parking lot and see the courts. 

Believe it or not, somebody said to a contractor "put in four tennis courts", so they put in four singles courts. They didn't even have lines for doubles and they were flat as a pancake. There was no slope so the water would move off, and the other two courts were down where the courts are now.

From those early years, how was it hosting the NCAAs in 2005?

That was special, I mean they're all special, but being able to do it at home at a time when there wasn't as much belief on campus that it was possible, and for the athletes there to actually see a championship and win was awesome.

The hardest thing was convincing me to do it. Obviously, we were a major factor every year and everybody wanted to come to Santa Cruz, they were begging to have it at Santa Cruz, and I knew for a fact that I would have one job of trying to coach a team and a whole other job trying to manage. sIt was just a lot of work but it was also fun, and we did some cool things. The host hotel was the Dream Inn so the teams loved it.

Bryce Parmelly was a senior that year and we picked him to be the spokesman for our team. One player from each team talked about their college experience, and he was the last guy up and he has the whole place falling out of the chair laughing, and did a complete roast on me. It was just hilarious. 

And then we won the Triple Crown: we won the team, the singles and the doubles titles.

Matt Seeberger won both, who was his doubles partner?

Seeberger teamed with Matt Brunner. When I suggested putting them together, people said it wouldn't work. Brunner came to Santa Cruz from Jesuit High School in Sacramento. He had kind of like frosted hair and he just looked like a preppy boy.

Four years later, he never got his hair cut once. He had hair down the middle of his back and wore a bandana, just like a hippie. Seeberger was at the other end of the spectrum.

Seeberger was at Air Force Academy for just the summer. He gets there and the upperclassmen, just abusing the pledges and drinking and all this. He just quits, and that's how he ended up coming to Santa Cruz. His coach had told him for years 'look at Santa Cruz' and I called him and he wasn't even interested but he was really really good.

So, when he came back and didn't know what he's going to do, he came for a visit. He met Bryce and and met the guys and he was like, 'this is where I want to be' and had a pretty magical experience.

Matt Seeberger returns a serve in his Singles Championship win at the East Tennis Courts in 2005 (Courtesy NCAA)		Team lifts the NCAA Trophy after winning the 2005 Title (Courtesy NCAA)

It was awesome. Again, I love those kids for sure -I love each of those teams- but that was a special group. That group had been close to winning. And the cool thing was, that year we lost in the finals of National indoors to Emory (coached by UCSC alum John Browning). We just got crushed.

We played Emory again in the regular season and we lost 4-3. At that point, our guys looked at each other and said, 'We've come a long way since indoors, we're hosting this year, they have to come to our house, we're going to get them this time.' And that was a key match. We beat them in the semis 4-1 (breaking Emory's 18-match win streak).

Can you recall any of those championship teams that you might have not have felt as confident they could do it?

The 1996 Team. An unbelievable team.

That team was right after the '95 team that won our second title. But the beginning of that year was like pulling teeth to get them to practice. It was not fun. Dave Muldawer- he and Seeberger might be the only four-time singles all-Americans at Santa Cruz. Dave was my assistant, but he and I said that it was a C to C+ regular season, and an A run at Nationals. We lost one of our best players early, then came together and really leaned on who we were in our character, and everybody stepped up at Nationals. It was a fun run at the end of a hard season.

Brian Shapiro was a good doubles player, but he never had been in our singles lineup until his senior year. He was #5 and he had enough overall skills to be good at five, but then he got moved to #4. He gets to Nationals and he was bulletproof. He didn't drop a singles match, and just crushed people. 

At Nationals, in the Semis against Gustavus Adolphus, we lost the doubles point so we're down 2-1.

And we lose four of the first six sets in the singles, but I'm going from court to court and our guys are not blinking-They're just locked in. And I'm having the most fun I've had all year long because all the chips are out in the middle, everybody's committed.

The Gustavus coach is a dear friend of mine. I'm going from court to court and- I just didn't even think- I slapped him on the rear and said, 'we got a match here you know?' And he's looking at me like, 'we're up 2-1, and we've won four of the first six. What are you talking about?'

In a heartbeat, we win all of those second sets that we lost. We close out the two that we won the first sets. So now we're up 3-2 with four matches in the third and win 4-3. 

It was really a tight match, but I think it gave us a ton of confidence going into the finals.

The 1996 Team after their finals triumph over Emory (Courtesy NCAA)

The only back-to-back titles, right? That must have felt great.

It's so funny. If you talk to somebody about me, we'll finish Nationals and nobody's having any more fun than I am, and then my mind will shift later that night to 'what's next year going to look like?'

For me, every year we won one I wanted to win one just as bad the next year. It's a whole other season. You're not defending anything, you're starting over.

It takes a special resilience to stay hungry year-in year out.