2024 USTA Eastern Tennis Man of the Year: Jim Poling

One Christmas Eve not long ago, retired Army men’s head tennis coach Jim Poling and his son Karl were driving out to the indoor courts at Boise State University in Idaho (where they now lived) for a little impromptu practice. Midway through the drive, Jim unexpectedly pulled over and ran into a convenience store—then returned with a six-pack of beer. Karl, confused, asked why he so urgently needed to make that purchase. Jim explained that someone was probably stuck behind the front desk at the university’s tennis center on Christmas Eve, and he just wanted to make that person’s holiday a little brighter.

“He was a bit of an everyman,” Jim’s wife Marianne says now. “He definitely cared about anyone who was in his orbit. No matter who you were, he treated you with kindness and respect.”

Jim Poling posthumously receives USTA Eastern’s Leslie J. Fitz Gibbon Tennis Man of the Year Award for precisely this generosity of spirit as he amassed the winningest record in Army men’s tennis history and mentored scores of developing players as they came through the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.

“What excited Jim was that you could use tennis as a means to help develop leaders,” she says. “Yes, he was competitive, and he wanted to win. But the whole purpose [for being at the academy] was [to help] the players learn about themselves and become stronger leaders. A lot of these guys would go on to make the military their career, and some would return to civilian life after their five-year commitment and become respected leaders in their given fields. So if you could help them, you were helping lift up society as a whole. I think he loved contributing what he could to that mission.”

In service to that mission, Jim took a congenial, personalized approach to his role that won him respect from the cadets almost immediately. The team went 15-5 during that first season, besting adversaries from Ivy League schools they’d previously never beaten. Beyond results, though, Jim forged strong, positive relationships with his athletes that lasted long past graduation; Marianne estimates she can count “on one hand” the number of players with whom he lost touch, dating back to the very start of his coaching career.

“Jim really cared about kids who played tennis,” she says.

“He was really good at seeing the big picture,” Marianne says. “If a drill wasn’t working, if the campers weren’t getting anything out of it or if they weren’t having fun, he’d go, ‘Oh well, we’re not wasting time doing that!’ He was always able to see what was going on with a situation and change it up.”

Helping others find fun and joy in tennis was of supreme importance to Jim as a coach, camp owner and as a parent. He understood that if you could get people to love the sport, they’d play it for the rest of their lives. After all, his own lifelong passion for the game stemmed from finding the right mentor. As a teenager in Winter Park, Florida, he’d often hang out by the courts at nearby Rollins College. Norm Copeland—the school’s legendary coach at the time—noticed him and gave him some advice, and from then on Jim was hooked. He went on to compete for the Clemson University men’s tennis team, where he was named the squad’s most valuable player his junior year. After college, he played on a low-level professional circuit in Europe for a spell. Eventually, he decided to try his hand at coaching, and the rest was history. He simply couldn’t imagine doing anything that didn’t involve tennis.

Jim even had tennis to thank for his marriage, as he met Marianne—a former player at Stanford—through the game. They were both hitting socially on public courts in Cocoa Beach, Florida when a mutual friend introduced them. The venue would eventually serve as the site of their wedding.

“When we moved to Boise, he became a volunteer assistant at Boise State,” Marianne says. “And at the time the school had recently hired a new young coach named Luke Shields. Jim would come home and say, ‘Wow, I’m learning so much from Luke! I wish I was 20 years younger so I could go back and coach some more, now that I know all this stuff.’ The game changes, right? It evolves. And he was always a student of it. He would call [current Army head coach] Randy [Rowley] and tell him about new drills. He just never quit loving tennis.”