2023 NCAA Championships: D3 doubles win is cherry on Shackelford's coaching career

As the 37-year head coach of women’s tennis at The University of the South—colloquially called Sewanee—Conchie Shackelford is a history-maker. The first woman to reach 600 wins in Division III tennis, and Top 10 all-time in career wins for coaches in all three divisions combined, Shackelford is a seven-time conference coach of the year, a three-time regional coach of the year, and has guided more than two dozen All-Americans between singles and doubles in her career to date.

But now, she can boast her first-ever national champions. On Monday at the USTA National Campus, Sewanee sophomore Brooke Despriet and junior Katherine Petty won the NCAA Division III women’s doubles title over Matia Cristiani and Olivia Soffer of Babson College for the first individual national tennis title in school history, 6-4, 6-2.

It was already the first time in school history that a Tiger (well, in this case, two) were playing for an individual tennis title. In 1993, Shackelford coached Becky Jo Doncaster and Cameron Tyer to the doubles semifinals, and Tyer also reached the penultimate round in singles. To get to the final, Despriet and Perrt knocked off both the No. 2 seeds and the No. 4 seeds before rolling to the win against Cristiani and Soffer, who were also unseeded. 

Soffer finished Monday as a two-time runner-up, as the sophmore had previously lost to Angie Zhou of Pomona-Pitzer College earlier in the day in the singles final.

The pair are the first national champions for the small, liberal arts school, which is affiliated with the Episcopal Church, is nestled in the shadow of the Appalachian Mountains and boasts about 1,735 undergraduates per its website, in any sport since 2000.

“It's pretty amazing. I’ve been doing this a long time and it's something you always dream of,” Shackelford said afterwards. “I can't really process it yet, but it will hit me. My whole emphasis to them was, ‘You have to understand that no matter what happens is so special, so special, and you just have to relish every moment that you've been here.’ That's kind of what I was trying to go with.”

In addition to her place in the record books, Shackelford occupies other rarified air in college tennis. Female head coaches in all three NCAA divisions can be a rarity, even on women’s teams, and Shackelford, a mother of four daughters herself, says that, over the years, she has never taken the responsibility of guiding hundreds of young women through their formative years lightly.