A return to the racket

A little more than 10 years ago, Scott Lippitt spent hours at the tennis courts on North Fee Lane.

Now, Lippitt is starting to reunite with the game of tennis.

The 1999 alumnus studied in the Kelley School of Business, passing time with his brothers of Sigma Chi and playing for then-coach Ken Hydinger’s IU tennis team.

A 0-for-15 challenge record during his freshman year left Lippitt out of the lineup, but he said he never felt wrong turning down tennis scholarships to other universities.

“I think it was the right decision,” Lippitt said. “It was a good-size school. It was a good program. It wasn’t top-five, so I had a good chance to move up in the lineup, and that’s what happened.”

Lippitt eventually played as high as No. 2 in singles by his junior year.

The California native said he never trained as hard as other tennis players he grew up with, but the consistency of daily practices at IU improved his play. Instead of giving up on tennis after his rough start at IU, Lippitt worked hard that summer and came back confident he would be a sophomore starter for the Hoosiers.

“I was getting a lot better my freshman year,” Lippitt said. “The guys that had all beat me at the beginning of the year, I was beating a lot of them at the end.”

But by the end of his junior year, Lippitt was looking to transfer to University of California-Berkeley.

“Basically, the coach at the time wanted to drop my scholarship down in order to bring in another foreigner, and that was not really OK with me, considering I should have been on a higher scholarship because I was going to be playing No. 2 or No. 1 on the team,” Lippitt said. “But I only had one year of eligibility left.”

So Lippitt decided to stay.

During his last year at IU, he did not play for the Hoosiers. Lippitt spent his time being, as he said, “a college kid.”

Now, the former IU tennis player spends his days as a partner in an investment management firm and, after only playing about three times a year for the past five years, is beginning to hit a tennis ball a few times a week.

“I was kind of burnt-out a little bit after college, and I had a bit of a bitter taste after how it all ended, so I didn’t play for a little while,” Lippitt said.

With a fresh look at the tennis scene, Lippitt offered IU tennis players a piece of experienced advice.

“Enjoy it first, unless it’s going to be a career,” he said. “Put it in the right perspective and do a little bit of everything and have a balanced life there. Make good friends because a lot of the people they’re playing tennis with are probably going to end up being lifelong friends, and lifelong contacts are pretty important.”

For Lippitt, tennis was not going to be his career, but he still wonders what life would have been like if he would have played his senior year.

“I’ve gone back and forth on that,” he said. “I guess I regret it in the sense of I’ll never know how good I would have ever been. But on the other hand, my life goal wasn’t to be a professional tennis player anyway. ... I can’t say that I don’t think about what might have happened.”