Courtship Complete: Love, lessons and awards for husband-and-wife duo

One of the fun parts of awards banquets is meeting the other award winners and comparing stories.

For Nick Mueller—winner of the 2025 USTA St. Louis award for Outstanding Junior Tournament—and Angela Reckelhoff—winner of both the 2025 USTA St. Louis award and USTA Missouri Valley award for Adult Player of the Year (3.5 & Below)—it’s more frequent than annual events.

It’s an everyday occurrence. Mueller and Reckelhoff have been married since 2017.

They met through tennis when they were both living in Evansville, Ind. Reckelhoff worked for a company that offered memberships at a local tennis club. She decided to sign up for group lessons. Mueller was the head coach of the University of Evansville women’s tennis team and a substitute instructor one Sunday afternoon at that club.

The participants were divided into groups of six based on their skill level, then rotated stations every few minutes. Reckelhoff’s second instructor was this guy “with a sweet smile.”

“I had no idea who he was,” she said. “I didn’t know if he worked there, because I was still kind of new to the club. I didn’t even know his name. For all I knew, he might have been married with 10 kids.

“I was single, and I remember thinking after that brief encounter with him that I had possibly just met my future husband.”

He noticed Reckelhoff, too, but he didn’t think too much about a relationship. He was more focused on his upcoming vacation. If he did think about her, he figured she’d soon forget about him.

She didn’t, although it took almost five months from the time they met until they started dating. Theirs was mostly a “baseline game” with neither one “charging the net” in the relationship. They married four years later.

On the court, Reckelhoff said she’s more of a baseline player because she’s “too scared to come to the net.” Mueller said he’s working on that with her. He is also far more complimentary of her game than she is. She described herself as “not a very good player in the grand scheme of things.”

She said the player of the year awards were “shocking.”

“I understand a little bit about the process that someone has to nominate you,” she said. “You have to go through a selection committee for them to pick you, based on some criteria. The fact that I was even considered is pretty shocking to me.”